Like Bhanu I don’t do development often, but I do have a full dev setup for those rare occasions where it’s necessary. My primary OS is Windows 10, so I have Ubuntu running within a VMWare VM for my development tasks. While I considered setting up within Windows, I like the separation that a VM gives me - work is in the VM, everything else is not.
I then followed the Beginners Guide to Install Discourse on Ubuntu for Development to configure all the dependencies and get Discourse up and running.