Well, 2020 is finally here! I don’t know about the rest of you, but this year seems the same to me as last year. There is, however, one major difference. This year, I plan to get organized.

I work in the computer industry with cloud technology. While “the cloud” is my principle focus, I have tons of side hobbies which occupy to much of my time. Things such as casual gaming, computer hardware, learning new computer languages, and computer networking just to name a few.

In the past, I took a wholistic approach to these technologies thinking that they would overlap so they would all come in handy during my work. While this is partially true, the fact is that they were more of a distraction that anything. While some of the information was definitely helpful, most of it simply detracted from my over all learning goals.

To that end, this year I vowed to put things into perspective and to achieve a postivie change in how I not only enjoy my hobbies, but also on how I actually GTD, so to speak. And it all starts today!

I started off by buying a new MacBook Pro 16 which I will use as my daily driver. Now as I mentioned previously, I’m kind of into computer hardware. I have several laptops which all serve some type of function. Everything from my MSI GS75 and Asus Rog Zephyrus GX502 for gaming, all the way down to my Lenovo X1 Extreme and C930 for work and testing. All of these laptops were purchased with a purpose but was it truly needed? I don’t think so. I belive getting one extremely strong machine to handle both sides of life could be enough.

So I started hunting. I looked for a laptop that supported Unix/Linux (since I work for Red Hat, I wanted to ensure that I had a laptop that would either run Fedora for development work or a version of Unix that I could modify). There were several on the market, including my already existing Lenovo X1 Extreme. However, I wanted to future proof my decision. That’s where the MacBook Pro comes in.

I got the 16 inch laptop with an i9, 32GB of ram and 2TB hard drive. Of course, I got the warranty to go along with it! The thing wasn’t cheap.

What this means though is that I have a laptop that is strong enough to handle my daily grind for, what I expect, the next 3 to 5 years.

My daily cycle includes standing up OpenShift environments in AWS, on VMware and bare metal, as well as a lot of coding and proof of concepts. The latter normally runs on my laptop. This MacBook Pro should be able to handle this workload for years to come.

In my next post, I’ll list out the items that I installed on the laptop to support my daily work life and my private life casual gaming.

See you on the flip side!