The Workstation: Computer

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Okay, so, your sitting down in class and your mind begins to travel to another dimension. Your professors voice begins to fade and before you know it your in day dream land. In it, you are a hotshot superstar software developer guy/gal with the latest most fantastic idea for an app. Suddenly, you snap out of it as your professor begins to wrap things up and you just jolt out the door.

You get home and recollect on your amazing idea. You rush to your room. Then you realize...oh. I need certain things to help materialize  amazing ideas. Just what exactly do you need to start smashing away on that keyboard to software unicorn stardom? Lets talk about your workstation set up.

 Let's get on with my first post series: The Workstation. While I will just generally list certain items, I will be elaborating on a few of them in later posts. Hopefully. Also, there would be a bit of a bias in the things I list due to the fact that these are things I have as a personal preference. 

1.) The Computer 

Alright, maybe this one is the obvious one. But is it?!? What do you choose to work on? A lot of people will tell you to stay classy and go with a Mac, then on another hand will tell you to work with a master PC rig decked out with liquid nitro cooling, more lights than an EDM show,  and powerful enough to to teach itself to code. Okay not that dramatic, but sometimes you'll see some comments like that. 

What I use:

- MacBook Pro 2015
I think it's pretty fair to state that Mac makes aesthetically pleasing products.  You think of Apple and you might equate that to quality product assurance. The insides are are wonderful as the outside. But you will hear a lot about it being overpriced for the amount of performance you get with a custom PC. Many programmers will tout that Unix based systems are much better when it comes to development.

- PC, brand: ASUS
I bought my PC from Fry's Electronics back in 2013 I believe. I WAS a PC only kind of guy for the longest time. The reason? Well, I guess I didn't really have a purpose to choose otherwise. I've used a PC for gaming more than anything. 

Conclusion:
I definitely use the PC more, for completing coding assignments. I will use the laptop for what I feel is it's main purpose: on the go work. I make sure to use programs that are cross platform  to easily work from PC to Mac and vice versa. That being said, my preference may gravitate more towards the Mac as I always hear that Macs are used more often than not in professional environments.

Also here are a few basic thing to look out for when choosing your system:

- The CPU
At minimum, try to get something with an Intel Core i5 2.0+ Ghz
- Memory
8 GB at least please. Even that might not even be optimal depending on what programs you create. Even more memory consuming are the tools you will be using. For example Visual Studio will EAT up resources. My PC has 12 GB and Visual Studio will sometimes experience the dreaded lag. 

Here's a nice blog article by Hafsa Danguir on Medium:



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