Osx

Three years ago MacBooks were in a pretty bad spot for me and I switched to Ubuntu, later Pop!_OS. It was a fun ride. While coding I felt very productive because the OS is so low in distractions and just feels incredibly responsive. Installing the world via apt beats brew 10x, and native Docker on Linux is so much faster it isn't even funny. We had to abandon Docker because we had folks with macOS on the team. But, other tasks (email, conference calling, scanning, word, upgrading without breakage) came with more friction, and those tend to fill up ever larger shares of my day.

It's not the first time I'm switching to Ubuntu. I've been, as they say, around the block when it comes to operating systems. I started out on MS, from DOS to XP, then Ubuntu from 5.10 Breezy to 9.10 Karmic, then on Apple from OSX 10.5 Leopard to macOS 10.14 Mojave. Both in terms of productivity and delight I had my best years on Apple and I didn't think I'd ever look back. But here we are.

I often share screens with co-workers by Campfire, Github, or mail. Visualizing something can save you a lot of typing. Show people what button shade doesn't look quite right, instead of explaining in 1000+ characters. Share a load graph without saving & attaching images, or handing out basic auth credentials. The list goes on & on. Once you make it a joy to share, you'll find use-cases on a daily basis, and it is my believe you'll lose less time on typing and miscommunication.

If you've written a webapp and you want to ensure that critical parts such as the signup process stay working, the best would be to have an actual user go through that process every time you change your codebase. But since that's both tedious & expensive, the second best thing is to automate a chrome browser (webkit engine anyway) to do this for you, and upload screenshots if anything unexpected happens. Welcome to CasperJS!