As a digital developer, you definitely need powerful development machines, capable of running several of the applications simultaneously. You need to be strong and assertive, and insist on your experience being the best that can be. You are responsible for your own learning. A digital developer should not be hamstrung with a laptop that is fit for the sales and marketing division.
Your workhorse must be able to physically handle the demands for every single tool in the following list:
|
Items |
Explanation |
|---|---|
|
Java SE 8 (or, at least, Java SE 7) |
Java SE 8 was released on March 18th, 2014 and it provides Lambdas, where functions are first class citizens. Java 7 is an acceptable alternative for the short term and for a cautious business IT director. |
|
Java EE 7 |
GlassFish 4.1 application server is the reference implementation for Java EE 7, but there is a lack of professional support. Alternatively, the IT directors may consider Red Hat JBoss WildFly 9 that does have Service Level Agreements. |
|
Integrated Development Environment |
IDE like IntelliJ IDEA 14, Eclipse Kepler 4.3, or NetBeans 8 |
|
Adobe Creative Suite |
Adobe Photoshop CC (and sometimes Adobe Illustrator) are the de facto graphics work inside the creative digital media industry. |
|
Cucumber or Selenium |
Cucumber is a behavior-driven development for testing the features of a web application. It is written against Ruby programming and thus, requires that environment and the tool chain. |
|
A suite of modern web browsers |
Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Internet Explorer 10 and the de facto web browsers that support HTML5 and the latest W3C standard. Required Windows 10 recently launched with Edge. |
|
Developer plug-in for web browsers |
It really helps to have a JavaScript debugger, HTML, and a CSS element inspector in your tool set. Plug-ins such as Chrome developer tool ease digital engineering. |
|
Text editor |
A lightweight text editor to handle small-scale work is often very useful for editing the JavaScript, Puppet (or Chef) scripts, as well as HTML and CSS files. |
By just examining this table of software, it is no wonder that the average business-supplied company laptop is so ill-equipped to handle this development.
Tip
Digital engineers are smart, professional engineers
I personally have a 2012 MacBook Pro Retina edition with 16 GB of RAM, 512 GB static hard disk drive as my main machine. Some of my clients have supplied me with badly configured machines. One particular client in finance gave me a Dell Latitude with only 4 GB RAM, running Windows 7 Professional. This developer machine was so poor in performance that I had to complain many times. Inform the decision makers in your business that digital workers need adequate development machines, fit for the purpose of engineering and designing great user experiences.
Let's switch from creativity and design to the Java platform.