Your article is really well written and you are spot on. I think for me this really depends on what you are doing.
About 8 years ago I could do this job with a MacBook Air. It was great, it had more than what I needed. The only thing I really wanted was a Retina display.
Now, I have a 13 inch MacBook Pro, the first with the touchbar and no escape key.
At 8 GB of RAM, double the MacBook Air, I am constantly maxing the RAM out.
The good news, I know what the problem is! It’s Chrome.
I am either opening 4GB or tabs in my browser. Or I have Figma or VSCode opened, both of which are electron apps.
Basically every app I use on my laptop today is just Chrome with a specific purpose. And those eat memory like nothing else.
So much so I am going to get 32GB, if not 64GB in my next machine.
So I feel this article could be less, why developers need good machines, and more, why does Chrome eat every resource on my machine, and why it has changed the developer landscape.
So I feel this article could be less, why developers need good machines, and more, why does Chrome eat every resource on my machine, and why it has changed the developer landscape.
I picked a few straw men culprits for the sake of getting a point across: Chrome and build times. For me the issue is actually Visual Studio with ReSharper, but that's less generally applicable.
Typically, developers are going to find ways to push their machines to the limits.
100% I agree, I just know that for my job it’s much worse today due to the tools and processes to do the same job I use to do. Yeah it’s more complicated, but is it better? IDK.
I feel your pain 😔 almost the same story's here. Thinking about MacBook Pro with 32 GB (I would choose some Linux machine, but I need to build XCode apps regularly)
Browsers and npm are evil, especially when you have to work on an application with huge codebase...
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Your article is really well written and you are spot on. I think for me this really depends on what you are doing.
About 8 years ago I could do this job with a MacBook Air. It was great, it had more than what I needed. The only thing I really wanted was a Retina display.
Now, I have a 13 inch MacBook Pro, the first with the touchbar and no escape key.
At 8 GB of RAM, double the MacBook Air, I am constantly maxing the RAM out.
The good news, I know what the problem is! It’s Chrome.
I am either opening 4GB or tabs in my browser. Or I have Figma or VSCode opened, both of which are electron apps.
Basically every app I use on my laptop today is just Chrome with a specific purpose. And those eat memory like nothing else.
So much so I am going to get 32GB, if not 64GB in my next machine.
So I feel this article could be less, why developers need good machines, and more, why does Chrome eat every resource on my machine, and why it has changed the developer landscape.
Ahah so true 😂
I picked a few straw men culprits for the sake of getting a point across: Chrome and build times. For me the issue is actually Visual Studio with ReSharper, but that's less generally applicable.
Typically, developers are going to find ways to push their machines to the limits.
100% I agree, I just know that for my job it’s much worse today due to the tools and processes to do the same job I use to do. Yeah it’s more complicated, but is it better? IDK.
I feel your pain 😔 almost the same story's here. Thinking about MacBook Pro with 32 GB (I would choose some Linux machine, but I need to build XCode apps regularly)
Browsers and npm are evil, especially when you have to work on an application with huge codebase...