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Joey Hess' minimal approach

joey.hess.usesthis.com

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Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#41

Post by moconnor »

kami8845 wrote: post #17
RyanMcGreal wrote: post #11

"If it doesn't have a keyboard, I feel that my thoughts are being forced out through a straw." Beautiful.

Yeah. Says the guy doing all his work on a 1024 x 600 display. I mean the guy no harm, but so much of what he says strikes me as incredibly back-worldly. Like using dial-up and limiting yourself to fan-less laptops. I mean I get the "thin terminal" philosophy where you have a shit laptop that connects to something much more potent. But where's the point if the connection sucks as well. I guess in the end we have vast…

Programming is sadly still pretty much text-based. How many characters do you display on your monitor? Could you display as many with a smaller font on a smaller display?

I don't think screen resolution is the bottleneck in information transfer here.

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#42

Post by hollerith »

mercurial wrote: post #29
kayoone wrote: post #15

big respect to this guy and he seems to make awesome software. But using a 5 year old netbook with very low resolution and 2gigs of ram, no external Screen and dialup modems for internet doesnt seem like a very productive working enviroment...but if it works for him, why not, but this is clearly is too minimal for my taste ;)

Probably makes it less tempting to procrastinate on Hacker News. Upgrading Debian Unstable must be fun though. Ugh.

Actually, it wasn't so bad in 2006 when I was running Debian. I ran apt-get update && apt-get upgrade at 3 am via cron.

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#43

Post by brandall10 »

mhd wrote: post #34

Interesting, but not totally unexpected as this is very much in the tradition of Unix terminal users. Never mind that today's "dumb terminal" is probably an order of magnitude more powerful than yesterdays mainframes, and you can fall back to even bigger servers without many problems. But I'm always a bit surprised by small-screen laptop-only users, whether it's this rather charming off-the-grid kind or your average…

5 months ago I transitioned from being a desktop C# app developer for medical devices to a Rails remote contractor.

This meant going from a dual quad core 3.33 extreme desktop machine with 3 displays (2 x 24 and 1 21) to an 11" Macbook Air with a 1.7 dual i5.

I'm much faster on the air. I have a tiling setup that I can quickly switch/move windows around, it keeps my vision and neck focused and reduces strain to both. It allows me to better mentally focus on what I'm currently working on, instead of having my IDE, source control, collab tool, bug tracker, etc, always visible at the same time. I'd rather do a couple quick chord commands than snap my neck 30 degrees one way for 15 seconds seconds then snap it back in the other direction.

As to heat/power? Spectacular with my MBA, this thing is as fast as last year's Macbook Pro and the iMac the year before. I've been writing software professionally since '96 and at least in the windows world, the tools have not changed a whole lot in that time period. The only advantage of a faster machine is faster compiles and db rebuilds/queries. And I'm not doing that enterprise level work of 300k+ code bases and 5 gig databases anywhere. But I did 15 years ago, and yeah, now something that would used to take over an hour might take 2 minutes. On my MBA is might take 5 minutes. For something I'd do a handful of times a day, not a big deal, but again, I don't do those types of things anymore.

Don't get me wrong. I'd appreciate more resolution. But probably more inclined to use that for extra clarity rather than increase my desktop space by a significant degree. There's a sweet spot where bad habits begin to creep back in, where just too much info is presented at one time that cognitive overload begins to set in. Just my personal experience, but I've had both setups and the latter works much better for me.

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#44

Post by waferbaby »

fafner wrote: post #37
elliott99 wrote: post #28

I've never been to usesthis.com before. What a wonderful website! I would love to see more interviews like this.

I like the idea of usesthis. But I'm a bit disappointed that most setups are boring and not really individualized. This makes a lot of the interviews uninteresting if you don't know (care for) the developer. "Spoiler:" 2/3 seem to be using a Mac Book and a fairly common configuration. Please don't misunderstand me. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that configuration. But it's not very interesting to read about.…

Yeah, I'm always trying to get interesting people, but I never know ahead of time what they use. Feel free to suggest more, though!

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#45

Post by brianobush »

moconnor wrote: post #41
kami8845 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Says the guy doing all his work on a 1024 x 600 display. I mean the guy no harm, but so much of what he says strikes me as incredibly back-worldly. Like using dial-up and limiting yourself to fan-less laptops. I mean I get the "thin terminal" philosophy where you have a shit laptop that connects to something much more potent. But where's the point if the connection sucks as well. I guess in the end we have vast…

Programming is sadly still pretty much text-based. How many characters do you display on your monitor? Could you display as many with a smaller font on a smaller display? I don't think screen resolution is the bottleneck in information transfer here.

I think it is great that it is text-based. Can you imagine searching for code without text?

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#46

Post by _feda_ »

Regarding all the comments here about dial-up and slow connections whether out of preference or necessity, I can't recommend enough having a slow connection and a data limit for helping you concentrate on the things that are most important to you, but take the most effort to think about or to do. I use a three mobile 3g dongle (UK) and pay £10 a month for 1GB of downloads. I use wget to crawl and download web pages to view offline. I've been doing this for over a year now and it's great for avoiding the huge potential distractions of broadband, torrents for example, being amongst the worst offenders (have you ever downloaded a 100 computer science textbooks and never got round to any of them because you were watching a whole season of star trek: next generation? It's kind of ridiculous.)

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#47

Post by bmelton »

kayoone wrote: post #27
anonymouz wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For writing or coding, a decent keyboard seems much more important than a high resolution screen. For consuming stuff the converse is true. (Even though I also prefer a high res display, and he mentions that it took him some time to set up Xmonad in a way that allowed him to effectively work with such a low-res display).

Well not everyone is coding in terminal windows and doing console-only stuff... for me doing interactive 3D development, a high res screen (or a couple of them) and a powerful machine is of equal if not higher importance than my keyboard.

I generally develop in terminal windows, doing console-only stuff, and I still feel stifled if I don't have at least two displays. I know that all the cool kids are using split terminals and the like, but I like to keep log output visible, a browser in a separate space and a console debugger up without having to toggle between them.

That anybody can get anything done with such constraints is amazing to me, but he's obviously quite good at it.

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#48

Post by jakobe »

It's great to be reminded that productivity doesn't really depend as much on the tools you use as some might have you believe.

I keep thinking about buying a faster laptop, or I'm complaining that getting fiber is way to expensive where I live, and then I read about someone on an ancient tiny netbook on dialup who is probably way more productive than I am.

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#49

Post by agumonkey »

jakobe wrote: post #48

It's great to be reminded that productivity doesn't really depend as much on the tools you use as some might have you believe. I keep thinking about buying a faster laptop, or I'm complaining that getting fiber is way to expensive where I live, and then I read about someone on an ancient tiny netbook on dialup who is probably way more productive than I am.

And developping on slow hardware is like having a free continuous profiler.

Re: Joey Hess' minimal approach

#50

Post by dailo10 »

"I don't use a desk. I work in five or six different places and postures around the house. When the weather's good, I'm outside, or on the porch. My preferred "desktop background" is some interesting view in back of my netbook's rather small screen."

This is such a liberating setup. I'm rethinking my need for a home office now.

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