The most important part of your setup is between your ears
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I grabbed a virtual coffee with a young developer recently. He eagerly told me about his impressive multi-monitor work from home setup. Then he popped a question that got me thinking.
What’s your setup? I felt a little embarrassed. I’ve just got my laptop and one 6 year old external monitor. It’s not even 4K bro.
He asked about my early career. I cut my development teeth on some of the exact same systems that he was working on today.
In fact I built some of them.
That was 20 years ago. It got me thinking about the relatively meager setup we had “back in the day”.
On my desk sat a single CRT monitor. Solitary, bloated and very low resolution. I had no laptop of course, just a snail of a PC. Our version of VPN access and broadband Internet was called “a car”.
If the web server went down in the middle of the night someone would call me and I would drive to downtown Joburg and restart the service.
We had no bitbucket or Github. Source control tools sucked to the point of being useless. We knew it was important so we did it by hand.
I’ve been reflecting on our relatively small team, our underpowered hardware and ancient dev tools.
We were passionate and professional despite our comparative constraints.
Now look, I love me some high-tech. And good tools make a big difference. But I’ve come to the conclusion that the most important part of your “setup” is not on your desk but in your mind.