Thoughts on OS X

I've recently just started on a new job as a web developer doing Python/Django type of stuff. I'm very new to this web development industry, as I previously worked with SAP ABAP, so it is rather exciting. The companies I've worked for doing ABAP work all used Microsoft Windows; and that's not surprising because Windows is ubiquitous in enterprise work environments. Personally, I use Linux, primarily because I can't afford a legit copy of Windows nor can I afford the high premium of Apple computers. But my current employer has given me the opportunity to work with an Apple Mac mini in the office. I've been using it for close to a month now and here are some of my thoughts about it.

Linux Distribution Usage History

A little over a year ago, I assembled my first desktop computer all by myself. I've been using computers for a very long time but it was only until that point in my life where I felt the inspiration to try and build one myself. After much reading and YouTube watching, especially the part about inserting the CPU into the motherboard, I bought all the parts and started assembling.

PC Build Components (May 8, 2013)

But this post isn't about that. When I successfully completed that build, I already decided to boot only Linux on the machine. And so I made a running file in Google Drive to log all the Linux distributions I've used since May 8, 2013. (I felt really stupid for not thinking of doing this earlier, when I started using Linux in 2008...but oh, well.)

Vagrant: "Development environments made easy."

I've been using VirtualBox as my go-to hypervisor provider. It's usually how I test out Linux ISOs I've downloaded to see if they run before I load said ISO into a USB device. Another thing I've recently used virtual machines for is to create a development server to, for example, host a LAMP stack, which I prefer not to install into my main OS. I do like to use the same tools when developing stuff across the board. This is where Vagrant shines! You basically create a Vagrant VM to get a LAMP server running but use the tools on your host OS (e.g. text editor, IDE, etc.) to edit the web pages that are served by the VM.

Vagrant is a great tool for spinning up VirtualBox VMs as fast as possible. You create a Vagrantfile, a file which holds the settings on how to setup a VM; things like which base box to base your VM off of, to the networking setup or to the shared folders the VM will have with the host machine. The Vagrantfile is written in Ruby code but it is very easy to grok and you don't need to learn the language to create one.

In this post, I gloss over my usage of Vagrant.