If you had £5000 to spend on technology what would you get?

I listen to the dot net rocks podcast and they ask this question every show. (If you don’t listen then you should!)

I don’t know what my answer would be as there are so many gadgets and cool things that I like the sound of.

I might get a surface pro 3, it’s a tablet with attachable keyboard that’s more powerful than my current laptop. But at £600 it’s expensive so maybe not. Maybe instead I would install a SSD into my existing laptop to increase disk performance.

I’d like a new car with lots of gadgets built-in. A friend gave me a ride in his new BMW and it’s nice. Bluetooth so I don’t have to have an audio cable to listen to podcasts. Parking sensors so no chance the wife will prang it. Built in satnav etc

While we are on the subject of cars eventually I’d like a google self driving car as I think Google is a better driver than me. Think about it I drive to a friends I have a drink I sleep in the back seat as my car drives me home. Once all cars are automated I believe the roads will be much safer.

The last thing I would spend on is an intensive training course on development, I would really like to get further in dev and more training would really help. Specifically something that would help solve my current dev problems. I am sure it is possible for me to learn dev with self-study but that requires a discipline I don’t think I have, I easily eat my time up with my current job, wife and other interests.

I recently had £6500 to spend on improving my employers IT infrastructure. That was really hard. It sounds like a lot of money, but it really isn’t.

Once I started looking at the problems that I wanted to solve and what hardware I wanted I quickly used it all up and that was before I factored in license and software costs. In the end I just had to order what I wanted and hope that on a future date I could spend on other areas. I got a super powerful server that I could virtualize almost all our existing physical servers with it I needed licences, which left me just enough to get a NAS for file storage.