[LRUG] MacBook for Ruby dev work

Tue Jul 19 02:31:23 PDT 2016

I run the London Code Dojo - so I get a pretty good overview of what
people use for development laptops.

I personally use a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, it's 2+ years old now
but still fine for dev work. People at the dojo typically ~50% use a
mac of some kind, usually a MBP and more rarely an Air, I don't think
I've ever seen anyone with one of the new MacBooks.

I see quite a few ThinkPads, a range of ultrabooks, and some
webbooks/chromebooks that have been converted to Linux - I'm guessing
most of these are second machines for poeple that normally develop on
a desktop, but you never know. A Haskell programmer that I know likes
to program on a 11" webbook, because they say that it forces you to be
a better programmer. YMMV.

Personally I don't like Apple's "you can't touch that" policy, so have
shied away from their hardware in recent years, but it's becoming
harder and harder to buy a laptop that is upgradeable/maintainable.
I'm seriously considering just carrying around a NUC and decent
portable 60% mechanical keyboard and plugging it into a display at
wherever I am (home/work), but this doesn't really cope with
Hotel/CoffeeShop very well...

@sleepyfox
--

On 19 July 2016 at 10:18, Jon Wood <jon at ninjagiraffes.co.uk> wrote:
> I've been using a laptop from PC Specialist for the past few years, running
> Ubuntu with XMonad for sane window management. Its not for everyone, but I
> love it - especially for the price I think you'd have difficulty beating it,
> my only complaint is that it can get quite noisy trying to keep the
> processor cool.
>
> On Tue, 19 Jul 2016 at 10:10 Ian Moss <hello at ianmoss.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Does anyone currently use a machine other than an Apple based product?
>>
>> I run unbuntu on a ThinkPad, and enjoy using it. Quite like it when I meet
>> others with one too, though we're pretty rare. Keep meaning to try mint, but
>> havn't got around to it yet.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Ian.
>>
>> --
>> Ian Moss
>> Meet for a coffee? https://calendly.com/oceanician
>> http://twitter.com/oceanician // http://www.linkedin.com/in/alteris
>>
>>
>> ----- Original message -----
>> From: Matthew Rudy Jacobs <matthewrudyjacobs at gmail.com>
>> To: London Ruby Users Group <chat at lists.lrug.org>
>> Subject: Re: [LRUG] MacBook for Ruby dev work
>> Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2016 12:27:29 +0800
>>
>> Our CTO bought the 12" Macbook bought last year,
>> and it struggles viewing our Trello projects on Chrome
>> (we have a lot of cards)
>>
>> He doesn't recommend it!
>>
>>
>>
>> On 19 July 2016 at 08:01, Jim Myhrberg <contact at jimeh.me> wrote:
>>
>> I know a couple of people who use plain MacBooks for work, I'll try and
>> get a hold of them to see if they want to chime in.
>>
>> Personally, while it's not a plain MacBook, I've been using a 2012 MacBook
>> Air (dual-core 2.0GHz i7, 8GB RAM) for the past 4 years as my main machine
>> for all development work. It's fine, and still does a good job. CPU isn't
>> always as fast as I'd like it to be, but 95% of the time it's enough.
>>
>> As far as I recall the first version of the plain MacBook was about
>> equivalent to the maxed out 2011 Air. And I believe the recently updated
>> MacBook brings performance up close to the 2012 Air I have.
>>
>> As for what I do, Emacs is my editor, I run mysql, redis and elasticsearch
>> in Docker Beta, and most of my work is Ruby. Basic Rails apps takes a few
>> seconds to boot, while more typical large ones are around 10-15 seconds.
>>
>> And more recently I've been on a Microservice project, where booting
>> everything locally kicks up around 30 separate Ruby processes. That boot up
>> is really the only time the CPU is painful as things kind of freeze for
>> 10-30 seconds. But once it's all up and running everything is fine.
>>
>> And on top of that I run Spotify, Slack, Chrome, Skype, and more than a
>> handful other apps too at all times.
>>
>> Only reason I haven't gotten a MacBook myself is that it's a lot of money
>> for something that's roughly the same as the Air I already have. If I'm
>> gonna upgrade, the idea is it'd be an actual upgrade.
>>
>> However if I was in your position and offered a choice between a MacBook
>> Pro and a MacBook at work, it might be difficult to say no to the MacBook I
>> think. Unless the MBP was a 13-inch retina with fully max specs of course.
>>
>> Best of luck :)
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mon, 18 Jul 2016, 23:02 Andi Studer, <andi.studer at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Does anyone have first hand experience in using a MacBook for Ruby dev
>> work?
>>
>> I am being offered new hardware at work, and can't make up my mind between
>> trusty steed MacBook Pro and feather weight MacBook.
>>
>> My setup is fairly standard. I use Atom as editor, my projects need local
>> PostgresSQL and ElasticSearch servers and I'd like to run DockerBeta.
>>
>> Feedback welcome
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