Husband. Father. Software engineer. Ubuntu Linux user.
đź‘‹ Hi, I'm Mike!
I'm a husband, I'm a father, and I'm a Catholic. I'm an Ubuntu Linux user, and I'm a senior software engineer at Strava. I have experience in a wide range of technologies including Linux, Ruby, PHP, Scala, Java, SQL, Redis, Kafka, Javascript, and Android.
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 three years before joining Zen Planner and finally moving on to Strava. I've been at Strava more than four years and I continue to love working on an app I'm passionate about and solving interesting problems along the way!
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.
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