Friday, September 30, 2022
I've owned the MacBook Air for three weeks now. I'm coming from a 14" MacBook Pro, so in many ways it might be fair to call this move a "downgrade". The MacBook Air is slower in multi-core tasks. It has a worse screen, missing the brightness and fast refresh of the Pro. It has fewer ports. It has worse speakers. It has less RAM (but we'll get back to that in a moment). What does the Air give me? Well, AIRiness. For me, that's a compelling tradeoff.
What Do I Need?
I'm a software developer doing full-stack web development and cloud-native services, so really what I need is RAM and speed in single core tasks, like JavaScript execution.
A better screen? - No, not really. It's nice to have but the work I'm doing is not in video, photography or UI design work. The screen on the Air is more than nice enough for my needs. Truth be told, I don't even have enough of an eye to notice the difference most of the time.
Multi-core speed? - Not required for my work. I'm not compiling native code. Sometimes I'm even doing my programming on remote VMs like an EC2 instance, so I'm leveraging the power of the server anyway, not my own device.
Ports? - I have a USB-C connection to my external monitor, which at once powers the device and stands in for HDMI. Otherwise, I virtually never use the ports on my devices these days.
Speakers? - Great speakers are a bonus, but the speakers on the Air are honestly not that bad. Or perhaps my ear just isn't good enough to hear where it falls flat. Certainly for a Google Meet or Zoom chat they're more than adequate. In any event, I often use my noise canceling headphones during work and the quality of the speakers there is what truly matters.
What about RAM though? - Heavy use of Docker, sometimes dozens of Chrome tabs and many open apps makes my RAM usage much higher than the average user. 8 or 16GB of RAM would be nearly unusable for me. Fortunately, for the first time ever the MacBook Air is offering 24GB of RAM -- an unusual number, given Apple tends to offer RAM in "doubled" tiers like 8, 16, 32, 64, etc. As it happens, 24 is a nearly perfect number for my work and I've not hit swap once yet. On a very intense day it's possible I might exceed 24GB RAM, but given how rare this would be, I'm not going to sweat it. SSDs are unbelievably fast these days.
Why the Air over the Pro?
I don't commute and I rarely travel, so it may seem like I could get away with a desktop or heavy laptop. And let's be honest, the 14" MacBook Pro shouldn't even qualify as a heavy laptop. The thing is essentially an "ultrabook", thinner and lighter than far less powerful competitors. What I do find though is that I get antsy sitting at my desk, though it's a standing one. I love to bounce around the house: working in bed, working on the couch, working in my cozy chair before the fire...
The Air is so damn light that it invites being picked up and used as a laptop. I simply love roaming around the house with it.
It reminds me so much of an even more mobile computer that I'd owned once upon a time, the 12" Macbook. That was an even more portable (arguably more beautiful) machine, but it ran an Intel chip so slow that I sometimes wanted to throw the thing at the wall. Oh, and it had 16GB of RAM, which even then was an issue. By contrast, this Air is an absolute powerhouse, running circles around most Intel-based machines. And as mentioned earlier, it has enough RAM and a fast enough SSD that you'd be hard pressed to critique anything about its performance.
So do I miss my 14" MacBook Pro -- a laptop I've called the best laptop I've ever owned? Not at all. This machine can claim the 👑.
Friday, September 9, 2022
I cannot express enough how much I disliked working in open offices for most of my career. For an introvert like myself, it's absolutely draining to feel like you need to be "on" for the time you're sitting at your desk. At one company I worked for this pain was compounded by a rule forbidding eating lunch (a time of day you might expect fewer people surrounding your desk) outside of the cafeteria, so I would resort to eating in my car; even in the depths of a Vermont winter!
Putting aside my own introversion, the other part of the open office that always struck me as inexplicable was how companies would place those in roles that required absolute focus -- like mine, as a software engineer -- in a room where others often needed to speak to one another. How can anyone be expected to do their best work like this? We all intuitively understand this is a terrible idea. This is why students take exams in silence and librarians are said to "shush". This is why if I was stuck on a problem I would simply try to leave a little earlier than 5pm so I could continue to work on it at home.
Why is this the dominant form of office space organization then? I think David Brooks rattles off a solid list of possible reasons at the end of his most recent column. And I expect more than one of them at a time tends to play a part.
In any event, I long ago vowed to never subject myself to the open office again and have happily been working full time remote for about two and a half years. I'd rather switch careers at this point than ever work in an open office again. For those who can't make the switch to remote work for one reason or another but despair of working in an open office, keep fighting the good fight!
Friday, August 26, 2022
Deno just announced what amounts to a massive upgrade:
We've been working on some updates that will allow Deno to easily import npm packages and make the vast majority of npm packages work in Deno within the next three months.
Our goal is to make Deno the fastest JavaScript runtime. For starters, the next release of Deno will include a new HTTP server. It is the fastest JavaScript web server ever built.
My Usage
It's been a bit since I've had the chance to leverage Deno. Last time I used it professionally was for a validation script. The script confirmed I'd successfuly combined a MySQL and a PostgreSQL database together without data loss. At the time (a year and a half back) I'd really liked using Deno, but I knew I couldn't bring it into a production codebase.
Is Deno Ready to Replace Node in '22?
Almost? I think it hinges on how well Ryan and the team behind Deno executes on the announcments made this month. If "80-90% of npm packages work in Deno within the next three months" and Deno really does, in practice, have the HTTP Server performance mentioned here, then I think we're going to see a huge wave of adoption.
Honestly, I'm excited enough about this that I'm considering rewriting my brand new static-blog generator in Deno. 🦕
Wednesday, August 3, 2022
I've recently rediscovered a "focus hack" I used to use before my days as a software developer. It's a simple little thing, and it's far from original. Tons of people do this. I simply went years without doing it and have only just gotten back into the habit.
So what is it?
You keep a pen and paper on your desk. When you feel your mind wandering, or you start to feel somewhat overwhelmed with all you need to do, you write down the next thing that needs to be taken care of. You don't make a list of all you need to do. You don't make a sub-list of items you need to do to accomplish the next thing. You simply write a quick statement of what you'll be doing next.
There's some power in simply commiting it to paper. I don't necessarily even glance at what I've written afterwards -- it's more the act of writing it. It centers my mind on the task at hand.
What has me doing this again?
After paternity leave I came back to a development team right in the middle of a big project. I was there at the start. However, I've found being part of the initial work scaffolding the project, then disappearing and finally reappearing after so much time has left me feeling emotionally and intellectually distant from the work. This might sound a bit the way people describe "burnout", but while the symptoms may be similar the cause is almost the opposite.
In any event, using this focus hack has proven helpful. It's another way of putting one foot in front of the other.
Friday, July 22, 2022
I woke up to an interesting feature in The New York Times this morning. The Opinion section led with a series of editorials from Times columnists in which the columnists ruminated on a policy position or political stance they'd gotten wrong. I was absolutely delighted by it. Afterall, it's cliché to say we learn best from our mistakes for the simple reason that it's true.
In their writing I could really see some of these columnists wrestling with their past beliefs in ways I too found enlightening. Brooks, Krugman and Stephens, in particular, really seemed to take the exercise seriously. (Gail Collins, on the other hand, seems to have found it an oppurtunity for a throwaway piece with a humurous tone...)
It would be great to see this become a recurring feature. Say, on a perhaps, annual or bi-annual basis.
A final note: the animated opening of the digital edition, with typos as metaphor, was a clever touch. 👍👍
