To start with, I'm gonna tell you about my experience in diving into professional web developer.
Back in early 2020, right where the COVID situation is about to emerge, I got my self into a new position in a good web development company based in Singapore. At that time, I was in a financial crisis myself with my family. I was just got out of a delicate justice situation and took all my savings. But thats for another time and place to tell.
Anyway, when I got this position offer, I already lost my desktop back where I came from and my acer v5 laptop is just about to expire. So i decided to get a new budget laptop that can be use as my toolbox with this new position.
After a bit of research here and there, consulting with some laptop seller, I decided to get a Lenovo Thinkpad T420 used one. At that time it cost me around 250 bucks. The reason i took this type is because I like the keyboard, as I know that in my line of work I would type alot of code and a good keyboard layout will atleast support my productivity.
With the shop spec of 4GB of RAM and 320 GB HDD, I5 gen 3 Processor clocked at 2.5 GHz, I thought it wasnt enough. So I decided to upgrade it a bit. I then pushed another piece of 4GB DDR3 ram on it and add an SSD to the CD-Rom Bay and thats about it.
For the longest of half a year, my T420 did its best to help me running tens of projects I have with the company. Mostly I will write code in VS code or PHP Storm. It runs a Laragon webserver everyday. Until I think my storage runs out to keep the projects files.
I don't like to have my active projects on cloud storage because at anytime i might need to reactivate it to troubleshoot something and perhaps adding features to it before I merge to production. So, I like to keep everything on my drive. Thats when I decide to replace the 320GB HDD with another 500GB and made that 320GB HDD as external.
Everything went okay. I did my projects with it without much problems, I did Front end and some Back End stuffs in collab with my peers, doing my daily remote meetings, having that Mattermost always running everytime I work. All and all, I can say my T420 runs smooth and suffice to support me in my role as Front end Dev.
Until around early 2021, where I update Mattermost, Zoom, etc, It seems that these application somehow took more resource than they used to. I started to have my CPU peak out, Memory never touched 8GB usage unless I was compiling assets tho. But this CPU peak, made me lost alot of time.
Now, I think my Laptop has asked me to retire him. Last time I was in a meeting with a client using bluejeans app, and my connection went screwed. I see the CPU peaked at 100% all the time and it just made my speech and video stutter like hell. I was meeting with Google Meet just 5 minutes before I have a meet using this blue jeans app.
So I dig abit and understand that somehow its a driver issue and there is no fix, coz well, as this line of Thinkpad series are already too old and i think has reached its EOL, Lenovo have no new updates for its driver or the hardware it self have already obsolete.
So to conclude, If you want to have a decent system to support you with your role as web developer, you should save some buck and get that better CPU laptops or Desktop. I'm not suggesting the I9 series. I5 gen 10 or Ryzen 5 should be enough for a couple of years.
What about RAM? As far as my experience, for front end, my 8GB RAM do me good enough. But more is always better. No need to go all the way to 64GB, I think 16 GB is more than enough if you don't run multiple site env on your local.
And the storage? For the storage, if you're on the budget, get those 160GB SSD coupled with huge HDD which is not that expensive now is enough. Wouldn't it too low, the 160GB? All I need the 160 GB is to host the operating system and my IDE so that it loads faster when I need them. everything else is on HDD. Oh, I just remember, I use a 32GB SD Card to host my webserver that I mount with the card ready I have on my T420. But if you have a bit more to spare, go for 256GB SSD and host your OS and Local Dev Server there could give you a boost in your productivity. As the the webserver will serve your dev site faster.
In the near future, I already planning to replace my T420 with another laptop. Like I said earlier, I'm planning to go with a Ryzen line up. I never like to use Intel lineup. hahah Even my previous desktop that I left in my hometown runs on Athlon x64 for the best of 10 years. And honestly, I would go back and use that again if I could.
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