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One common thing in all usesthis.com interviews is, no one uses Windows OS as their main operating system and Mac is used most. Only person I found using Window
by skbohra123 16y ago
One common thing in all usesthis.com interviews is, no one uses Windows OS as their main operating system and Mac is used most. Only person I found using Windows is Mitch Altman so far.
- augustl 16y agoAnother Windows sighting! http://jakob.nielsen.usesthis.com/ http://jakob.nielsen.usesthis.com/
- unwantedLetters 16y agohttp://jason.rohrer.usesthis.com/ http://jason.rohrer.usesthis.com/ Another windows sighting. And the most fascinating of the interviews I've read.
- rkwz 16y agoWhat would be your dream setup? Dream setup? This is it! Incredible!
- pivo 16y ago> On the other partition, I installed Ubuntu 7.04 (aka Feisty Fawn), which is my main development OS, and what I boot into almost every day. So he uses Windows and Mac OS for platform-specific builds, but Linux day-to-day.
- unwantedLetters 16y agoAh, true. I was posting it more as just a simple sighting of Windows, and because Jason's setup is pretty incredible.
- elblanco 16y agoI know this isn't a popular POV, but I've always thought that developers should work on last gen hardware. Getting good performance out of last gen hardware ensures great performance for the typical user. (okay, let's be reasonable, the build machine should be stupid fast so nobody is sitting around for half a day while the repository builds).
- ryanelkins 16y agoI think that would be true for testing, but not for actual development. When I'm working I want to marginalize anything that might slow me down. You did mention the build machine should be fast - but don't most people build locally first before pushing out? I guess it also depends on what you're building. I mostly work on stuff that isn't used by a consumer. It's going to run as a service on a machine or network of machines far more powerful than my PC. I imagine most people developing for consumers though are building websites or mobile apps. Mobile apps should be tested on a variety of devices, and it would take a pretty intense website to start bogging down most people's machines I imagine.
- pyre 16y ago> it would take a pretty intense website to start bogging down > most people's machines I imagine. Not necessarily. On an internal website we found that IE8 took 8 seconds (!) to run a jQuery/jQueryUI command to style all of the buttons on a page. Granted there where more than a couple of buttons, but the point is that DOM manipulation can be a time sink if you don't manage it right. (By contrast the same command took ~1s in Chrome and Firefox, which still isn't insignificant).
- ryanpetrich 16y agoOne second of DOM manipulation _is_ significant.
- pyre 16y ago> which still isn't insignificant An extra second of page load isn't as noticable as 8 extra seconds of page load. Especially on older systems where you might be used to some amount of delay (but not 8 seconds of delay on internal apps).
- ryanpetrich 16y agoI guess it depends on what your baseline is. For most of my pageviews, an additional second would double the load time. On an internal app/site an additional few seconds usually isn't worth the trouble, but externally can make a real difference: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/googles-marissa-mayer-speed-wins/3925 http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/googles-marissa-mayer-speed-wi...
- grandalf 16y agoI once had an Inspiron 4100 and it was by far the most ergonomic (for typing) laptop I've ever used.
- d_r 16y agoI do the meat and potatoes of my work in MS Visual C++ Express. I find, the best development environment is the one that you've been using for 10 years. When I do iPhone builds, I first do my best brontosaurus impression, then I copy all my code and art onto a memory stick, unplug my monitor, mouse and keyboard from my PC and then plug everything into my Mac. I'm not sure if this was serious or not. (From: http://justin.smith.usesthis.com/ http://justin.smith.usesthis.com/)
- Tiktaalik 16y agoThe indie games scene is still pretty PC focused because of the long standing domination of the PC over the Mac in the gaming area. It's only now slowly changing.
- eswat 16y agohttp://gabe.newell.usesthis.com/ http://gabe.newell.usesthis.com/ Probably worth mentioning that this post was done way before Steam and many Source games came out for OSX publicly.
- pasbesoin 16y agoWell, I can agree with this part: The main thing is to have a process more than a single particular setup. I've tried all sorts of home-built systems, including water cooled, phase change, etc... The conclusion I've reached is that upgrading every 6 months is more important than trying to get the fastest possible system at one point of time. The time and energy I used to spend optimizing my hardware I now spend making sure it's easy to swap out my current machine for a new machine with the least downtime. Not so much from the perspective of constant hardware upgrades, but from the perspective of being able to translocate and go (and, presumably, also back up an entire environment as easily).
- vgurgov 16y agocheck out _why http://why.usesthis.com/ http://why.usesthis.com/
- joe_bleau 16y agoOne of my favorite hardware hackers does: http://andrew.huang.usesthis.com/ http://andrew.huang.usesthis.com/
- seltzered 16y agoyeah, he motivated me to get a thinkpad over a macbook at the time. That said, i'm getting tired of my T500 already. I don't see myself really needing expresscard as much as I was bent on it. Overall, I've learned that ergonomics matters at the end of the day no matter what machine you use - meaning I care less about laptop screen size and more about bang for the battery life. I can't convince myself to buy a desktop either, so I'm considering getting a 13-14 inch laptop with the fastest processor, ssd, and gobs of ram instead.
- MichaelGG 16y agohttp://stephen.wolfram.usesthis.com/ http://stephen.wolfram.usesthis.com/ "My current desktop system is a Windows 7 64-bit 8-core machine" Although to be fair, he also says it "changes practically every week."
- billmcneale 16y agoYet, 90% of developers use Windows on a daily basis. The people interviewed in usesthis are just not very representative of the community (a bit like using a conference to claim that 90% of developers use Mac Books). I'm still sad to see some of these people (including pg) use such antiquated tools. I use vi on a daily basis but just for very small text files, you can be so much more productive with more modern tools these days.
- ramchip 16y ago> you can be so much more productive with more modern tools these days. I'm more productive and make much better-looking documents with emacs+xetex than with Word. YMMV.
- pyre 16y agoMaybe he considers emacs part of 'modern tools'?
- aerique 16y agoI'd rephrase it and say: "You can be much more productive with mature tools.". Which Emacs and vi, ofcourse, are.
- pyre 16y agoIs 'vi' mature? Or are you talking about Vim? vi has been around a long time, but the functionality is rather limited compared to Vim. When was the last development on vanilla vi (not Vim in compatibility mode)? [ keep in mind that 'mature' != 'old' ]
- aerique 16y agoI meant Vim, sorry.
- 16y ago
- neurotech1 16y agoI met Mitch recently at Noisebridge and we discussed the idea of a Linux LiveUSB dev environment for people starting out, but not familiar enough with linux to self set-up.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]