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Discussion on: You Don’t Need a MacBook to Become a Coder

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elasticrash profile image
Stefanos Kouroupis

I have a Macbook Pro. Never used it for development. I use it for recording and mixing.

I always used windows and before docker I would use virtual box if I needed a Linux environment.

Yes you can start on anything. But not anything is cut out for all types of development.

My computer requirements nowadays though turn out to be the following one.

At least 16gb or ram to run my virtualized environment with ease. That's it.

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ferricoxide profile image
Thomas H Jones II

My last laptop, I bought a roided-out "workstation replacement" laptop. Six months later, all of my programming activities had moved to a cloud-hosted lab-environment. And, while Firefox and Chrome both love to go to town on my RAM, even at 32GiB available, they stop becoming responsive well before they reach half that usage-level. Since I'm no longer running local VMs, the quad-core design isn't real helpful, either.

Very likely I'm going to dial-back my "requirements" on my next purchase. :p

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Ross Henderson

I do agree that you should use whatever system you want.

But I will admit that a lot of tutorials/training/whatever completely assume you have a MacBook. When I started looking at Docker the tutorial I was following said "Install NPM via terminal" and I was sat dumbfounded, now having to Google what NPM and whatever the terminal was.

I really wish it was easier for everyone to have a similar environment to learn on.

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Nočnica Mellifera Heroku

Really good point! Though now thankfully you can install npm just as easily on a Windows machine (the only error in that tutorial is saying 'terminal.' In fact I recently wrote a CLI tutorial for people in just this situation :) dev.to/heroku/the-cli-for-beginner...