Comment by swozey

2 years ago

I had a coworker a few years ago who worked ONLY on his laptop. No monitors. No keyboard. No mouse. He programmed all day on a 13" Macbook Pro.

I will never understand it because I absolutely hate having full screen windows and I am almost worthless working off my laptop when traveling. Just lots of frustration juggling windows back and forth. I always have 2 or 3 apps side by side on my 48" and I have a 28" 16:18 DualUp monitor next to it for long text/dev.

I didn't work with him so I don't know how productive he actually was but I've always been curious if he kept up with the people who had 2-3 monitors and input devices. I have a hard time believing that he did but no actual idea.

Damn, that's crazy. Yeah, I don't see how that's physically or mentally possible. Completely alien to me.

The "laptop only, one app only" guy I knew actually was really verifiably productive. Which again is insane. We were working on a big Rails monolith. A task that inherently involves working with dozens of files simultaneously and looking at things up and down the stack while also looking at documentation and running code in the browser.

  • Not sure if you ever watch programmers on twitch, but check out ThePrimeagen, I think he's a perfect example of someone who really understands his tool of choice. One screen, one app, one window, and he navigates through code bases faster than anyone I've seen. It's a pretty entertaining stream too if his super high energy style isn't off-putting to you.