Appreciating Local Environment
Before I even started classes at Flatiron, I was told to set up my local environment to be ready for classes. Eager to be ready, even though I repeatedly saw that Mac’s were strongly suggested for this course, I felt comfortable with my normal PC. I didn’t think it would matter that much. A computers a computer. I followed the directions and enjoyed my last few days before classes started.
Day 1 comes and we’re told to set up our environment if we hadn’t and test that we had everything working. Easy enough right? Wrong.
I had failed almost every test making sure everything was installed correctly. Alright maybe I should get a mac. But they’re expensive and I probably won’t use it much except for school.
Not valuing how important having a functioning, reliable environment, I reached out to a friend who I knew had around 10 or so old Mac laptops, I could just borrow one for the course easy-peasy. Now everything will work fine right?
Reinstalling everything, I still have errors but nowhere near as much as last time. Great! My only problem is automatic submissions, that’s no problem. Now is when I truly sank into a false sense of security. Even though the laptop was slow and it took half a day to just connect to my wifi, I chose ignore the warning signs. I decided, since I can still use my main computer for the early assignments since I had installed everything Ruby related without issue, I don’t have to use the laptop.
Actually using your environment!
Rather than grow accustomed to what should be my work environment for the next few months, I chose to work on my main computer rather than the one I specifically got for this course. The separation of work and home is so important and especially with the pandemic. With the pandemic, the line separating the two become harder to see and it can sometimes blend into each other causing chaos and work to be harder as well as relaxation to become more stressful.
After seeing how chaotic my life became from trying to use my original computer as much as possible for coding and transferring over when things wouldn’t work because obviously I never set up my environment on this computer, I realized I’m making myself work way more than I need to.
Taking the time to customize
One thing that incentivize me to become excited to work on my laptop for coding everyday was customizing it for myself. Whether it be, getting an extension on Visual Studio Code to have it be super colorful, or adding stickers all over. Making your workspace both functional and comfortable is super important to making sure you’re not just suffering trying to get code working but rather learning and enjoying yourself.
Also, getting into the nitty gritty of it, make sure what you get is good to use. Sometimes cheaping out and trying to save money will be your own downfall when you get an old laptop that is barely able to run. Or possibly falls apart with a new update. With Windows computers, it’s easier because you can build it yourself and it can be a fun project as well as help you learn about your computer, knowing what’s not working when something bugs out and how to fix it. Taking the time to research on what you’re buying or building will be more helpful in the long run then simply trying to borrow a friends spare laptop collecting dust in the closet.
Wrapping it up
Your local environment is almost as if not as important as your actual code, because it’s what gets you to code and let’s you focus on the actual coding rather than the hardware. If your coding session is taken up mostly by simply trying to get your computer to load something, you won’t be making much progress. An investment is always needed but especially here and in the long run it’ll pay for itself!