Not that I want to dwell on the past or anything, but ever since I made the decision to let go of my personal laptop, I have been using my humble little 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 as part of my portable setup.
Like I was sharing with my lecturer during class yesterday, this tiny little machine has it's limitations. It doesn't run quite as fast as a decent laptop, that's obvious. But it is still usable despite slower loading times.
I am thankful for a platform like CodeSandbox because it allows me to offload majority of the processing power and memory resources to the cloud. With a local VS Code installed, I can tunnel in via a remote connection to work on my projects, tinker, or do a deep-dive on certain topics; all while ensuring that the RPi 4 still has sufficient resources left to run other things in the background.
1. Development in the Cloud
As a dev, I've chosen to use Ubuntu as my dev OS environment for running on the RPi 4 because at rest, the OS only consumes about 1.6GB of physical ram. That said, clearly ram isn't the real issue here (for me at least), it's the CPU cores.
It does make me wonder, will the RPi 5 with 16GB ram run much faster? I would assume that to be yes. Perhaps the right question I should be asking is, "How much faster?"
Does anybody have an answer to that?
2. Running Different Types of Projects
Another benefit of using CodeSandbox in my current circumstances is that the hardware itself isn't compatible to run certain types of React/Node.js projects. Trying to create or run React/Next.js projects would fail due to the incompatible CPU architecture. I'm not sure if this is a known issue, but I'm just sharing what I've encountered so far.
It is why I've decided to use the CodeSandbox cloud environment instead. This meant that even though I had lost my laptop, it doesn't mean that my work/projects have to stop. I can still continue with my work. Being on a free tier just means that I need to manage my usage and ensure that I don't waste the free 400 credits.
I suppose it is a good thing (looking on the bright side) that with my current struggles with ADHD, the most productivity I can usually get out of each day is only 4-5 hours each. That is with intense, hyper-focus. It's a condition that can be either good or bad depending on how we manage it.
Final Thoughts
So, it's time for me to get back to my deep-dive. Currently, I'm hoping to dive much deeper into my understanding of Next.js. I've used it before in past projects, but it was only for a brief period of time. Now, I just want to gain a much more in-depth understanding of how it's key features work under the hood. By developing that level of understanding, it is what helped me to become really good at the many development tools and frameworks that I've been supporting and using for years.
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