Part 3 of my 2019 favourites. Here are the items I enjoyed using in September and had to share my experience with them, both good and bad.
July favourites and August favourites.
MacBook Air
I got my hands on this sometime in the middle of September, and I still can’t hold my excitement. My favourite thing about it is its slimness! I know there are much slimmer laptops out there, but this is the slimmest I have ever owned. It even fits in my handbags because lately, I am not a back-pack kinda girl.
My second favourite thing about it is the user interface. My opinion, apple has the best user interface in general. Phones and laptops. I love how I can easily slide across different windows using the track pad and I love how the icons on the menu bar are clearly defined.
The battery life is super impressive. It charges super fast and in a day, I will only need to charge it once. This obviously depends on what I am doing and how much I am using it. In the case I start using it at 8:00 am with full charge, I will probably get through a typical work day of just coding without having to plug it in again because it’s dead or dying.
For some reason, lit keyboards make me happy so I’m glad this Mac also has that feature. 🙂
The position of the power button on the top right of the keyboard is perfect. I don’t like power buttons on the side of the PC. I happen to find that inconvenient and I am one of as much convenience as humanly possible.
Performance wise, my hp has exceeded it. With an i5 processor and 8gb ram, it has served me pretty well, with a few kinks here and there, naturally. But I’m not complaining because these kinks can still be easily overlooked.
It took me sometime to learn the necessary key combinations of doing some things because I have always used a hp. Like taking screenshots, copying and pasting (don’t laugh), how many fingers on the track to perform a certain actions… etc. It needs a whole freaking manual, but there’s google for that :). I am slowly becoming a guru now.
PyCharm
I use python a lot and that is why I have gone for PyCharm as my IDE (integrated development environment) of choice. It was created by JetBrains, so I guess I have them to thank.
What stood out for me was the code editor. I don’t know if I could do this if Visual Studio Code or any other editor, but I am able to set maximum characters for a line in the settings and my code automatically proceeds to the next line after it has reached the maximum number of characters in a single line. This has makes sure I stick to writing clean code and obeying PEP 8 rules. It also identifies duplicated code, code that is not used, typos and misspellings, and errors. I mean, it basically does all the heavy lifting for me while I’m writing code, reducing my debugging time.
For more about the benefits of PyCharm, this article covers it all. For a python developer, I would gladly advice PyCharm as your IDE, because its just perfect and does not use so much RAM. It is compatible on Mac, Linux and Windows OS’s.
That’s all for my September favourites. I would love to know what items you have enjoyed using recently. Software, devices, apps, games, anything really. I am all ears, or in this case, eyes. Comment below 🙂