Edgy Developments

What’s important in a laptop?
So what are the most important features of a portable laptop for doing Ruby development? It may vary a bit from person to person, but here’s what they are for me:

• Speed – If you keep autospec/autotest running in the background to continuously like I do, you want your tests to run fast and not bog down your laptop while you’re writing code
• Battery life – For a laptop that’s being used on the go in places where you may not always have access to power, this is a big deal
• Size – It’s not really portable if it’s big and heavy
• Price – I’m not willing to spend a lot of money on something that’ll be obsolete in a couple years

Pick two or three
Want a fast laptop that’s also cheap? No problem, but odds are it’s not going to be small/light or have good battery life (for example a Dell Inspiron 14). So that gets us 2 out of 4.

How about fast, good battery life and small/light? Also doable, but don’t expect it to be cheap. That’s 3 out of 4.

Yet another option is to get amazing battery life, tiny size and an extremely low price with a netbook. But then speed goes right out the window with their Atom processors, right? Maybe not…

Using the ‘net’ in netbook to make an ideal Ruby development laptop
One of the selling points for netbooks is that they don’t need to be exceptionally fast since they’re intended to be used primarily with web applications, which offload most of the computational heavy lifting onto web servers. I wondered if the same sort of offloading to the web could be done for my Ruby development. As an experiment I decided to give pushing my Ruby development “into the cloud” a try.

So far I’m impressed with how snappy this netbook is, thanks to pushing all running of ruby code onto a server. I’ll follow up with more details on how I’m going about this, since it’s not entirely trivial. This setup may not be for everyone (I wouldn’t ever try to pry your macbook pro away from you), but for those who are into netbooks it’s a great way to make fast Ruby development possible on these fun little laptops.