I have been thinking for a while that a MacBook Pro looked like the ideal Java development machine. That being said I didn’t really want to drop $2500 to actually confirm my idea. I had suggested it at work, but corporate policy had us on Dell machines. Anyway last week I mentioned that I think the ideal developer setup would be buying us all MacBook Pros and one of my coworkers was kind enough to mention that there was an unused on the front end team occasionally needs to debug issues on the mobile devices but otherwise I could use it. Thus began my first week trying it out as a replacement machine.

My first impression on the Macbook was navigation was difficult. I didn’t have page up or page down buttons on the keyboard and with the mouse only having 1 button I found the ctrl-click option to right click really clunky. I mentioned this to a coworker and she told me about gestures. It was like the heavens opened up and the sun shined down upon me. This was clearly a better way of working. Want to right click with your mouse, just click with 2 fingers. Want to scroll just drag 2 fingers. If you need to see your desktop there is a gesture for that. Or want to switch to a different open app, you can do that. It is a crazy fast way to navigate, and there are all sorts of possibilities. My next thought about the Macbook Pro is that it is so thin and light. I can comfortably sit on my bed and type with this on my lap and it doesn’t get hot and cook my legs like my dell did and it is crazy fast. So my impressions so far seem to be correct, this really does seem to be a better machine to work on.

Being a Java developer I wondered which version of Java it had, so I typed java –version and it said Java wasn’t installed and took me immediately to the download page. Next on the list was does this thing have git? So I typed in git –version. And it says git is not installed would you like to install the full xcode package with it, or just the command line tools, a click and a password and I have git. One of the big issues I had early on was how to VPN in at work. We use Cisco AnyConnect and the package that was out there seemed to be corrupted so I couldn’t install it on my machine. I did some searching and found this OpenConnect VPN on Mac OS. It works great. It also led me to find out about homebrew. All your favorite unix commands in an easy to install way.

Needless to say I am pretty sold on this Macbook Pro and now it is just a matter of transitioning everything over to it. In the meantime I got the Windows Remote Desktop App from the App store and I can log into my other laptop in the office and work remote if need be till I get everything transitioned over.

In other hardware news, I built a new desktop in the last month as well. It is one of the new Skylake processors from Intel (an i5-6600K) with 16GB of DDR4, and a 1 TB SSD on the new Z170 Chipset. This machine is great. My old machine was definitely lagging so it is nice to be on some new hardware. I am running Windows 10 on that machine and it is turning into a solid gaming Machine under Steam. I retained my old Nvidia 660Ti Video Card for now due to lack of budget, but I am hoping to upgrade to a faster GPU next spring. I would also like to go to 32 GB of Ram, but figured that can wait until after the holidays.

Anyway this should explain the lack of posts for the last month. Too many toys and not enough time. Hopefully I can get back to my weekly posting schedule with what is going on. Things are moving at work. My new Cassandra Data layer has really come together and Mojohaus finally updated the aspectj-maven-plugin with the patch I need so I am no longer running my forked version of the project. The last 2 months of the year are going to flyby and then I will have to recap on my themes for the year and see how I did.