They did invest in Alibaba as well as ARM and Uber and runs the SoftBank Vision Fund. They may have failed huge on this one but have been doing quite good.
Yev here -> well that chart hasn't been updated in a while. For starters we're just $0.01/GB for downloads (we dropped the price last year). Our performance is generally pretty good, and we're partnered with cloudflare (free egress) if you need more umph. But most of the time folks don't have any issues with just our regular service.
You’re not supposed to do anything else except what you want to.
I’ve typed on a laptop sitting below an external monitor for since 2006ish. I do this because I want a narrow keyboard without a numeric keypad centred below my displays.
I want a touchpad directly below the keyboard so that can reach it quickly before returning to the home row. I want everything as symmetrical as possible.
I touch type with a non qwerty layout so I want my keyboard to have the same feel regardless of if I’m in the office or away on business.
I find heavy, long throw keys make my wrists tired so I use a very light pressure short travel much more comfortable over the long term. Eg the kind of switches you get on laptops.
I have an IBM model m and a Pok3r with MX Brown switches on the for comparison and I don’t really care for either of them.
Your usecases maybe different from mine. I’m fine with that.
I'm glad my employer outfits me with both a Linux workstation and a Linux laptop. One of the little fears of looking for a new job is I'll want to filter out some high percentage (like 90%?) of positions for the petty reason that they just dump a macbook pro on every dev as their sole machine. Thanks but no thanks, I can't stand any Apple hardware or software.
As another comment mentioned, there is no perfect "for devs" computer. Developer tastes are too broad and disjoint.
Why? Because you can end up with a single machine than having have to constantly worry about having same environment and data and all that between multiple machines.
If you plug in your laptop to an external monitor and a keyboard, you essentially get a desktop, except you can take it out there with you without worrying about leaving any data or config behind.
If you have to "constantly worry" about your setup, something is wrong. There are many ways to right such a wrong. In my case I don't worry a bit, I set things up when I have a new machine and I'm done, my tweaks afterwards are few and far between and easily synced or reapplied. I'm not even making use of VMs or containers. If I do find I'm missing data on one or the other, a quick scp later and I'm fine.
When you plug in to a dock you "essentially get a desktop" except in all the important ways: workstations are much more powerful (for me the full build difference is 25 minutes on a 2014 workstation vs 45 minutes on a 2018 laptop; our newer workstations are faster still and will bump me from 64 GB RAM to 128 while the laptop has only a passable 32), don't overheat or degrade from constant power, have faster and bigger storage, have various peripheral ports already (often more than docking stations even (and functional, though this is a jab at a specific keyboard: https://matias.ca/aluminum/mac/viewer/3.jpg -- imagine what happens if you plug in a yubikey)), support proper gigabit+ networking, typically have better GPUs (or make it trivial to insert better GPUs) and can drive more and bigger and faster displays...
Workstations also contribute to healthier work cultures. They demand a desk that's "yours" and can be personalized some which is a tempting thing to take away in laptop-only orgs, they demand a reasonably secure office space and trustworthy maintenance staff, they demand a good office network that among other things also enables a dumb and cheap windows laptop work flow: sign in remotely (like with NoMachine) and everything is done on the workstation, it's also another solution to the 'worry' of missing state. (Some companies take that to another level and cheap desktops are also dumb clients to a cloud VM.) Finally they help avoid the feeling of your work always being taken home with you -- even if you additionally have a laptop it's more there for work-from-home or travel support, not the primary work mode, and expectations of out-of-the-office-hours tasks and availability being normal are gone.
I wouldn't buy a MacBook until they sort out the keyboard problems, but when my employer gives me the latest MacBook Pro to work on, I'm absolutely happy! It's a wonderful machine, and if it breaks – not my problem at all.
There was a time when you could reasonably evaluate employers with the Joel Test: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-s... But if you take "10 or lower and you’ve got serious problems" as accurate, it seems very few orgs these days lack serious problems. Ignoring the other criteria, few seem to meet even the relatively easy to meet criteria of having quiet spaces (8) and having the best hardware (9) -- or at least if not 'best', then more impressive than what the typical employee has at home.
I have 8GB on my Mac and I'm constantly slowed down by lack of RAM. Built a Hackintosh with 32GB and it's a world of difference. I don't know how people survive with such little RAM.
I do all my development on a Mac with 8 GB of RAM. It’s fine for my needs; I’m just very picky about keeping Chromium from running in the background on my Mac.
Spoken like someone that just uses a text editor to write JS. I used to spend a long time in massive Java codebases where the IDE would need some serious horsepower to index the code. Then I'd be running an application server for testing (inside a VM) and running another VM to for the SOLR index and another VM for the very heavy SAP ERP system. Then I've got Chrome and other apps asking for memory and processor power.
This setup is pretty common for people working on large integration projects.
Yeah, I use IntelliJ, Chrome, Photoshop and a few other smaller apps and sometimes even run Win10 on Vmware but I never see any noticeable slowdowns. I do tend to quit apps that I don't use as I hate cluttering my alt-tab list.
Call me old, but these days everything including people are so ram hungry I cannot believe the days when things were being done with less than a GB ram.
People talk like having more ram feels like a champ but as developers you might as well want to think about how things can be achieved using less ram.
I don't care about using less RAM, why should I? My applications run in our private cloud and sometimes in public clouds. We optimise the parts that need optimising but it's often cheaper to scale the environment, add more SOLR servers etc than it is to jump in to the opcode and figure out the best way to get the JVM to JIT something.
I work alone in Japan for my own company but boy people work too much I think. Some people reply to my message after midnight and that is someone who is employed and not someone running a company.
And some other people message me on Saturday morning and again, that is an employee but the good part is that for the people I know, they don't look unhappy or maybe they're just used to that work hours... I don't think I'll want to work like that if I'm an employee.
When I was an employee for the one year in my entire life, I asked for overtime (I was the only person getting it in a company of about a dozen people) and usually worked 9-10 hours for 5 days.
There's also Duplicacy which I feel is a bit more mature than restic (I felt it more performing and it also has a web interface but the lack of mount capability that restic has is what I miss and retention policy is quite easier to specify for restic too), though it's a paid software for non personal usage.
But paid is good that the author has less reason to move away from it. (As mentioned elsewhere, restic hasn't been updated in a while but they recently changed their pricing to be much more agressive which I hated. I wish they give it a softer pricing model than cost per machine.)
I use both restic and Duplicacy, so my backups are done by multiple implementations toward multiple destinations not to get bitten by one of their bugs to avoid the saying "backups aren't working when you need it the most".
They did invest in Alibaba as well as ARM and Uber and runs the SoftBank Vision Fund. They may have failed huge on this one but have been doing quite good.