🎉💻My fresh development setup for 2020 (VS Code, Windows 10)

Fresh year 🎉🥳 Fresh setup 💻👩‍💻

💻Laptop

I'm using a Razer Blade 15 2018. It has 16gb of RAM, which is a must for me as a developer. I want to have at least 3 or 4 browsers open with a ton of tabs. Visual Studio Code with a ton of running extension can get pretty heavy pretty fast. The Blade also has a non-glare display. This is the one thing I don't understand about Macbook's. In the sun, it is a mirror where you can't see anything but yourself 🤷‍♀️.

The question is now, do you need such an expensive laptop? No! Right now, you can get super laptops that are good enough for 500 euros/us dollars. Just look for an AMD one with a Ryzen 5 or 7. 8gb should also be enough if you look that you don't open too many tabs.

Let's start to setup up our new laptop.

🖼 Windows 10 setup

The first thing I do is to install a clean version of Windows 10. Maybe your lucky, and you get a non-bloatware Windows 10 🥳.

Now connect to the internet and update windows to the latest version. Enable the integrated anti-virus and firewall. They are reliable and usually enough these days.

🐌 Windows 10 slow ring

You can skip this part if WSL2 is released into stable windows!

• Open the windows 10 settings(the new interface)

• Click on "Update & Security"

• Click on the left side of the "Windows Insider Program."

• Enroll in the insider program and choose the recommended slow (ring)

• Let Windows 10 update again.

This is how it should look:

Why are we on the slow ring? To use WSL2!🐱‍💻

🍨 Install scoop

Scoop is a command-line installer for Windows. It installs programs from the command line with a minimal amount of friction.

It is pretty easy to install.

Open a power shell

iwr -useb get.scoop.sh | iex

Now you can simply type:

scoop

If you now see a man page with many commands, you know that it installed successfully.

Scoop comes with buckets. Buckets are collections of installable applications or fonts.

We need to add 2 extra buckets.

scoop bucket add extras

scoop bucket add nerd-fonts

We need to update the buckets. We do this with:

scoop update

👩‍🏫 Installing new software

We can finally start to install new software without even opening IE.

Let's start with 7-Zip and Git. These are needed for installing other tools with scoop

scoop install git 7zip

now Firefox and Google Chrome

scoop install googlechrome googlechrome-canary firefox firefox-nightly

Also, I like the new Windows Terminal.

scoop install windows-terminal

Next Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio Code Insiders

sccop install vscode vscode-insiders

I also like to Insomnia. Insomnia is a REST Client

scoop install insomnia

VLC is also something you usually need

scoop install vlc

That is enough for now!

you can check the installed applications with

scoop list

If you want to check what app is out of date, you can run the following commands

scoop update

scoop status

If you want to update more then one app, you can simply run

scoop update *

Keep in mind that this is not the same as scoop update. You need to run scoop update first to update applications.

🐧 Installing WSL2

Let's install WSL2!

Open the Windows Store and search for "Ubuntu". As of writing this blog post, there are 3 versions "Ubuntu", "Ubuntu 18.04 LTS" and "Ubuntu 16.04 LTS". If you know that there are no restrictions, you can simply Install "Ubuntu".

After you have installed "Ubuntu". You can open the Windows Terminal, and in the tab bar, click on the arrow pointing down. Click on Ubuntu and, if needed, do the setup. Now you should have a running Ubuntu on your Windows machine!

Fantastic 😁!

Setting up Ubuntu/Linux

Now type the following commands in the open Ubuntu Terminal.

First, let us update Ubuntu.

sudo apt update; sudo apt upgrade

Next Docker!

sudo apt-get install docker docker-engine docker.io containerd runc

Now that we have docker install, we also need to start the service!

sudo service docker start

Testing if Docker is working now

sudo docker run hello-world

Next nodejs 13.X(the current version as of publishing this post)

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_13.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs
node --version

I like yarn instead of npm.

curl -sS https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/pubkey.gpg | sudo apt-key add -

echo "deb https://dl.yarnpkg.com/debian/ stable main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/yarn.list

sudo apt update && sudo apt install yarn

Since git is already preinstalled on Ubuntu, we don't need to install it.
We only need to set the name and E-Mail.

git config --global user.name "FIRST_NAME LAST_NAME"
git config --global user.email "MY_NAME@example.com"

We also need to generate SSH keys

ssh-keygen

👨‍💻 Visual Studio Code

I have released a small series about Visual Studio Code.
You can find it HERE

My Setup since then has not changed.

The End

I hope you enjoyed it!

If you liked this blog post, please give it a like, and if you really liked it I would appreciate a follow either on dev.to or on any of the following social media accounts. 👇👇👇

👋Say Hello! Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn | Medium | Twitch | YouTube