I decided that my Macbook from 2007 was no longer cutting it. It had been a long journey, and I learned a lot about hardware repair:
- RAM upgrade
- screen replacement
- fan replacement
- heat sinks and thermal paste
Six years later, I decided to stick with an Apple product -- Macbook Air, used like new through Amazon Warehouse Deals, saving about 25% off the retail price. Essentially it’s an open-box product; the packaging is damaged, but otherwise the product itself looks and functions as if it were brand new.
Migrating all of my files over was a breeze using Time Machine, and I have been able to jump right into some programming work with Tic Tac Toe. My first hiccup occurred when I tried to use Git. Apparently Apple did not choose to include developer tools with the latest OS which meant that there were no command line tools in place when I tried to install Git using Homebrew. After installing Xcode I was able to get everything back up and working like normal. And I learned a bit about Homebrew -- it is an awesome package manager.
Now that my development environment is up and running (smoothly and quickly!) I’m happy as a clam. Some of my latest reading material includes:
- Looking for (and found) keyboard shortcuts to make flipping through windows faster
- Good reference for learning grep (regular expressions)
- Learning about naming conventions
- Picking up a few tidbits about best practices in Ruby
- Solidifying understanding of Ruby and why it is good