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Showing posts from May, 2019

A somewhat pragmatic comparison of OS for software engineers

The debate on which laptop is the best for professionally developing software has a tendency to get somewhat fanatic and emotional. When it does, this debate quickly depreciates because it becomes particularly difficult to discern opinions from facts, plus people get all shouty which is rarely a good thing in the context of a discussion. It's a shame, because I do believe that it's an important question which will most certainly affect one's development experience in many ways. Seeing that I have had experience working with all the major contenders (i.e., Windows, Linux, and macOS) at least to some extent, I'm hoping my experience can be of use to people contemplating new setups for professional software development. It's important that we define KPIs (a fancy word for criteria) which we will use to perform the comparison. Hopefully this will help avoiding statements like X is better because it's gray. Unless gray is a criteria I actually care about (spoiler

Sending the right kind of message

I have recently had a number of colleagues tell me about their work environment. I find tech culture fascinating and rarely miss out on a chance to get first hand details. One of the companies I was told about, had a well stocked kitchen area with an LCD monitor looping through various dashboards. Sales leader boards, news about deals getting closed, social media and tons of other sales related material. Occasionally it would also display pics of people who had birthdays coming in. This may be be a good point to mention that the friend who told me this, had been working at a branch which consisted of mostly R&D and some product, few to none sales people whatsoever. This setup made me think. Dozens of software engineers and researchers walk by the LCD monitor in the common area every day, numerous times, and get an excruciatingly detailed view of the names of the sales persons who made the most sales, how many places they went up or down that week, the number of deals closed