Too Long; Didn't Read
Julian Lam spent a long weekend configuring a Raspberry Pi as a home theatre PC. He bought the 4GB variant of the Pi 4 from BuyaPi.ca (Hello Ottawa!) with a Flirc case and micro-HDMI adapter. The Pi was more than suitable for HTPC tasks, and it's not a leap to say that you could use this credit-card-sized computer as a development machine if you wanted (although build tasks would take longer). He installed NodeBB on it and ran a sample build -- how does it stack up?