I find it crazy that some people only use a single laptop for their dev work. Meanwhile I have 3 PCs, 5 monitors, keyboards and mouses, and still think they are not enough.
There are a lot of jobs that should run in a home server running 24/7 instead of abusing your poor laptop. Remote dedicated servers work, but the latency is killing your productivity, and it is pricey if you want a server with a lot of disk space.
Hah, I find your setup crazy! I don't need or want that much stuff. To me it would get in the way, and increase my maintenance burden.
I also like having things Just So; and keeping windows and browser tabs and terminals etc. all in the same place on several different machines would drive me nuts.
I have one 3:2 aspect ratio 13" laptop, and I do everything on it. My wife had two large external screens for work that she doesn't use anymore, but I never use them. I like the simplicity of staring at one single rectangle, and not having extraneous stuff around me.
> There are a lot of jobs that should run in a home server running 24/7 instead of abusing your poor laptop.
Not sure I buy that. My laptop has 20 cores and 64GB of RAM, and sure, maybe a full build from scratch will peg all those cores, but for incremental builds (the 99% case), single core perf is what really matters, and a home server isn't going to give me meaningful gains over my laptop there.
And my laptop can very easily handle the "strain" of my code editor with whatever developer-assistance features I've set up.
Sure, CI jobs run elsewhere, but I don't need a home server for that; the VPS that hosts the git repository is fine.
I dunno, alt+tab works as fast for me as moving my head to look at another monitor.
And I'm not particularly concerned with "abusing" my laptop. I paid for its chips and all of its cores, I'm not going to not use them...
it is not about the chips or cores. it is about the pcie ssd that you torture it with high temperature for a long period of time due to a laptop poor cooling.
or the battery, it does not like high temperature either.
you only regret it when it happens. and it will happen.
> and it will happen.
I dunno... I've been doing this a long time. And haven't had any of the failures you're talking about. You're aware these machines throttle performance as necessary to prevent from getting too hot?
I was away from my regular desktop dev PC for multiple months recently and only used a crappy laptop for dev work. I got used to it pretty quickly.
This makes me remember so many years ago starting to program on a dual core plastic MacBook.
Also, I’m very impressed by one of my coworkers working on 13 inch laptop only. Extremely smart. A bigger guy so I worry about his posture and RSI on such a small laptop.
TLDR I think more screen space does not scale near linearly with productivity