I’m not the first person to write about a $500 developer laptop. In fact, I was
inspired by Max Rozen’s Replacing my MacBook Air M1 with a ThinkPad
T480 and
Getting your own good enough laptop for under
$500.
Like Max, I’m not only writing a blog about this – I’m actually using the $500
laptop I’m writing about as my personal daily driver. You don’t need a $2,000
computer to have a great machine for web development! The laptop I chose is a
great alternative to the ThinkPad T480. (ThinkPads are great, but they’re not
the only way to get an incredibly capable and pragmatic laptop on a budget.)
I’ve been a fan of Dell for many years, and my $500 developer laptop is a
Latitude 7490. I recently bought one to replace the Latitude e7450 I was
using. Let’s see how it stacks up to the T480, and how well it works as a daily
driver.
I’m sure everyone’s had a frustrating experience trying to optimize their home
wifi network. You put the router in a great spot for the TV, but you have bad
wifi on your deck. You move it somewhere to provide better coverage for your
deck, but it causes intermittent problems streaming movies to your TV. Figuring
out the ideal wifi setup is tricky, and poorly documented. (But I’m hoping to
provide some better documentation in this blog post!) I recently optimized my
home wifi network to provide better coverage throughout my house, and I
discovered some cool techniques along the way that I want to share.
Learning to create 3D models with OpenSCAD has opened a world of possibilities for
me. Once I was comfortable with the basics, I wondered what it would look like
to push the boundaries of programmatic 3D printing even further. In my day job
as a software engineer at Strava, I work with GPS data from running and cycling
activities. What if there was a way to bring that data into OpenSCAD to use it
in a 3D model?
ConfessIt is an examination of conscience app for Catholics. Available on Android, iOS, and the web. The Android version has 4.7 stars in the Google Play App Store after more than 730 reviews.
About
I'm a senior software engineer at Strava. I have experience in a range of technologies including Linux, Ruby, PHP, Scala, Java, SQL, Javascript, and Android. In my increasingly scarce free time, I develop some websites and Android apps. I maintain ConfessIt, an app for Catholics, with a 4.5 star rating after more than 550 reviews and 28,000 downloads.
I graduated Summa Cum Laude from the Colorado School of Mines in 2011 with a degree in computational and applied mathematics; I subsequently completed a Master's of Education at the University of Denver as part of the Denver Teacher Residency. After a short stint of full-time teaching, I returned to the field of software engineering at SpotX, where I worked for 3 years before joining Zen Planner and finally moving on to Strava.
