I sadly work with a similar situation. My laptop broke down, leaving me no choice but to work with an Intel Celeron, 2GB RAM, 32GB HDD beast of a machine. Here's my take on how I managed to survive (so far):
Ditch whatever OS you currently have and install Lubuntu. It only takes 300MB of RAM on idle. And you'll need as much of it as possible.
VSCode is out of the window for me as well. VIM or Emacs would've been perfect for me, but I don't know these two enough to be productive. The best compromise that I found is with Sublime Text.
Manage you browser tabs religiously! Web content is so massive nowadays that 2GB will be eviscerated by 3 unsuspecting tabs. I use Firefox as my browser because it feels snappier than Chrome, but YMMV.
Keep a close eye on your storage. Running and rebuilding Docker containers for a while may swallow up storage space on your end. Good ol' docker system prune should do the trick most of the times. Keep your download folder clean and delete any unused files after you're done with them and you should be golden 😁
Update: I managed to salvage my girlfriend's laptop and it has modest yet considerably better specs (Intel i5 and 4GB of RAM). I still follow my rules above and I manage to hover around 2GB of RAM usage, with PyCharm Pro instead of Sublime. Those ~2GB worth of extra RAM sure do come in handy when my workflow starts to become complicated.
Bonus Tip: with a limited amount of resources, Postman is a huge killer. With a bit of tinkering and creativity, I managed to get a ton of value out of HTTPie using JSON files on disk as my payload(s). Combine it with your homegrown shell/Python scripts and you'll get a sexy API smoke test suite that you can commit on your VCS. Neat-o!
Same thing happened to me, laptop broke down and I didn't have enough money to get a new comparable one, so got something I could work on in the meantime.
My laptop has 8 GB of RAM and a coffee lake i5 CPU with Windows preinstalled, which is more than adequate for everyday tasks and web dev. The laptop hit its limit when I started working on a medium sized React-Native project in which I needed to run
Dockerized PostgreSQL server
Android emulator
Dev server
Web browser
Docker & emulator were just enough to bring my laptop to its knees, and the development process was very painful. Then I tried to install Ubuntu (not Lubuntu), and Linux magically solved all performance issues at once. Ubuntu hits swap file from time to time, but it never freezes or spits out BSOD. The only downside I can think of is that I cannot use my fingerprint sensor anymore on Linux because it uses proprietary driver.
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I sadly work with a similar situation. My laptop broke down, leaving me no choice but to work with an Intel Celeron, 2GB RAM, 32GB HDD beast of a machine. Here's my take on how I managed to survive (so far):
Ditch whatever OS you currently have and install Lubuntu. It only takes 300MB of RAM on idle. And you'll need as much of it as possible.
VSCode is out of the window for me as well. VIM or Emacs would've been perfect for me, but I don't know these two enough to be productive. The best compromise that I found is with Sublime Text.
Manage you browser tabs religiously! Web content is so massive nowadays that 2GB will be eviscerated by 3 unsuspecting tabs. I use Firefox as my browser because it feels snappier than Chrome, but YMMV.
Keep a close eye on your storage. Running and rebuilding Docker containers for a while may swallow up storage space on your end. Good ol'
docker system pruneshould do the trick most of the times. Keep your download folder clean and delete any unused files after you're done with them and you should be golden 😁Update: I managed to salvage my girlfriend's laptop and it has modest yet considerably better specs (Intel i5 and 4GB of RAM). I still follow my rules above and I manage to hover around 2GB of RAM usage, with PyCharm Pro instead of Sublime. Those ~2GB worth of extra RAM sure do come in handy when my workflow starts to become complicated.
Bonus Tip: with a limited amount of resources, Postman is a huge killer. With a bit of tinkering and creativity, I managed to get a ton of value out of HTTPie using JSON files on disk as my payload(s). Combine it with your homegrown shell/Python scripts and you'll get a sexy API smoke test suite that you can commit on your VCS. Neat-o!
These are some great tips John!
Same thing happened to me, laptop broke down and I didn't have enough money to get a new comparable one, so got something I could work on in the meantime.
If you use Firefox you can give a chance to Resting.
It's a browser extension that take inspiration from Postman and with the goal to be lighter
DISCLAIMER: I'm the creator and the maintainer of Resting
My laptop has 8 GB of RAM and a coffee lake i5 CPU with Windows preinstalled, which is more than adequate for everyday tasks and web dev. The laptop hit its limit when I started working on a medium sized React-Native project in which I needed to run
Docker & emulator were just enough to bring my laptop to its knees, and the development process was very painful. Then I tried to install Ubuntu (not Lubuntu), and Linux magically solved all performance issues at once. Ubuntu hits swap file from time to time, but it never freezes or spits out BSOD. The only downside I can think of is that I cannot use my fingerprint sensor anymore on Linux because it uses proprietary driver.