Helpful Coder

I've been back on Windows now for awhile, and WSL has made it quite an easy adjustment. You still get the occasional "WTF Windows" moment, especially after a big update - but I'm pretty happy with it. At the time I just couldn't justify splashing out for a pricy macbook with no escape key and a stupid "hotbar" thing... Anyways, if you're used to working in the LAMP stack and haven't tried out the combo of WSL and windows terminal, give it a try! Or at least try WSL if you don't use command line much. WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) basically lets you run linux inside windows. I use it to then run MySQL and Apache/PHP - and I'm good to go. Most of my work happens inside a Windows Terminal window, which has become a pretty slick, configurable terminal. I have a 'projects' directory set up, in which each of my various projects reside. When I want to work on one, all I have to do is edit the apache config to use that particular ...

Reading through my old posts, I found it ironic that one of them was about how I was back to using Macs again for work. Ironic because after eight years of using a mac, I switched back to Windows about a year ago. The reason was that my old mac laptop was getting long in the tooth, and I absolutely hated the new macbooks with their janky keyboard and stupid touchbar. Apparently the keyboard has gotten better since then... but I still feel that the macs are just too expensive for what you get. So I switched to Windows, thinking I'd dual-boot with Linux to give me an appropriate development environment. I still spend most of my time at the command line or in vim anyways. But I decided to try out WSL in Windows just to see what it was all about. What a pleasant surprise! I ended up getting a nice 13" gaming laptop that packs quite a punch in a lightweight package. Windows 10 is decent enough. It still has a lot of those annoying Windows quirks, but I can live with that. ...

I have a terrible secret. For the last few months, I've been using a... Mac (gasp). Now I may be the only mac-user on this blue ball that isn't some sort of die-hard apple cultist. I think they're great (if over-priced) hardware, and I dig OSX. I don't think Steve Jobs is the second coming. I hate iTunes and iPods. I don't have an iPhone. I don't like black turtlenecks. But this does make a nice little web development machine. I have a command line (that's not DOS...) and a unixish OS. It has apache set up right away. It has a very nice UI, and there is some amount of "it just works" - although I'm not sure that's more true with WIndows. But it is more true than of even the best linux distros, at least in my experience. So, stay tuned and I'll point out some handy apps for any other web devs who've made the switch.