Not if you want binary compatibility with the majority of GNU/Linux installations. Compile something on Gassy Baboon, then try to run it on Slackware 12, go ahead, I'll wait but not long because the binary won't run...
But strictly for development, doesn't it make more sense to just use whatever distro you feel comfortable with, and to achieve binary compatibility before you deploy, compile on a Debian box? Or am I missing something? This assumes that the project would need no changes to compile on each distro.
At worst I would think that you would have two project configs with minor differences, prolly wrt include libs and paths, one for your Ubuntu development, and one for your Debian compilation. Since Ubuntu is built on Debian, I would think the differences would be painless to nil.