Tag Archives: MacBook Pro

Picking a language

Posted by on April 10, 2011 No comments

Every year at work we review our development and performance objectives.  How did we do on them, what are the objectives for this year, etc.  Since I pick my development objectives I’ve decided that one of them will be to learn three new languages/frameworks.  There are plenty of languages and frameworks to choose from, so much in fact that I have had a hard time nailing down which ones I want to try and tackle.  Of the many options to choose from I’ve narrowed down the list to the following six:

  • Grails
  • Python
  • Objective C – really get into it this time especially now that I have my new MacBook Pro :)
  • Scala
  • Ruby On Rails
  • GWT

I actually jump started my goal in the beginning of the year by attending one of the SATJUG meetings which was over Grails.  The presentation at the JUG was enough to grab my attention and bump it up in my list.  Groovy is an interesting language and I’m really liking how the Grails framework makes use of it’s dynamic nature.  There’s also some entertaining value of having a class called GString in the core language.  Scaffolding is nothing new but Grails does it with flair.  Throw GORM into the mix and you have yourself a pretty slick web framework.  Despite all that I don’t see it having a home at work other than for prototyping due to our ‘culture’ which saddens me.  Regardless, this framework has a lot going for it.

I still haven’t picked my next language/framework, I’m open to suggestions, but I hope the next one I pick is as unique and versatile as Groovy/Grails :)

Pro, MacBook Pro

Posted by on March 25, 2011 2 comments

After much deliberation amongst myself I finally broke down and bought a new 15″ MacBook Pro.  Thank God for the USAA employee discount because it saved me a lot of money.  I decided to not get the SSD at this time going for more hard drive space over the speed.  The 128GB SSD just doesn’t seem like much when you have 80GB of music and 10GB+ of videos and pictures….

Tech Specs:

  • Processor – 2.2GHz Quad-core Intel Core i7
  • Memory – 4GB DDR3 (who actually pays for the upgrade?)
  • Hard Drive – 500GB SATA 7200
  • Upgraded display and a few other small upgrades

My existing MacBook, that’s MacBook not MacBook Pro, is a good 4 years old and has served it’s purpose of watching movies and surfing the web well.  I’m looking forward to actually being able to code and run services without waiting 10+minutes for anything to load.