The author is missing two HUGE points in favor of MBPs: battery life and assistance.
Just today I went out at around 12 PM, worked non-stop in a nice cafe' until around 4:30 PM, went to buy some stuff, worked for 2 more hours, came back and realized I still had 30% left. That's insane (I'm using multiple VMs, IDEs, Chrome etc.). Especially considering that I feel the upgrade to Sierra has decreased battery life considerably.
Now, THAT's what you want from a laptop. Good performance, great materials and not having to panic if you forget the charger at home.
Apple's customer care and global warranty are universally known. They will even replace your battery for free (under warranty or Apple care) if its capacity goes below 80% (http://www.apple.com/batteries/service-and-recycling/).
(MBP early 2015 with 16 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD)
Note: I'm not an Apple fanboy (my phone is Android, never owned an iPhone) but when a product is great you just have to admit it.
This post should be titled "I made a game with ImpactJS and packaged it for iOS with phone gap" because any of the tools you used might be at fault. You said it yourself the same phone is capable of running high-end 3d games smoothly so, maybe, there is something wrong with GPU acceleration in either Impact or canvas with WKWebView. That might be the reason why Unity uses WebGL. Saying "I won't do it again" after not knowing precisely the cause of the performance issues, and just blame hybrid apps in general, is not very scientific.
Nice article but there is a fundamental thing missing: how to deploy and manage the fleet of containers to avoid downtime (e.g. having a systemd service that stops the container(s) and starts them with the new image is not optimal) and centralize logging.
From my experience "deploying" containers is pretty easy: build the image, push the image, pull the image, start container. The hard parts are: how to deal with persistency (I decided to let RDS manage my database), how to centralize logging and monitoring (just Cloudwatch? Swarm? Kubernetes?), how to make sure the cluster is healthy at all times (e.g. a container crashes, is it being replaced? How long does it take?) and how to make sure you have the correct number of containers running (e.g. I want 2 containers for the app server, 3 as workers, 1 as load-balancer).
If you really think about it, once you remove these advantages (from using containers, that is) the difference between running a container and having a script that provisions a virtualenv and adds a supervisor/systemd/initd service is negligible.
Assuming sleep works for everyone the same way is not very scientific. And such drugs help transition between an unhealthy lifestyle and a healthy one without having to give up productivity, focus and whatnot.
Getting to "Fuck this noise, I give up." is a very clear indication that you aren't competent enough and you should take a GOOD course about git as soon as humanly possible.
TL; DR: buying a Macbook tricked me into going through a "dark" phase. It was worth all the money.
This isn't necessarily true all the time, although it is in many contexts. For example millions of people are eagerly awaiting the new, shiny, same-as-before-but-slightly-more-expensive-and-with-a-couple-new-features, iPhone 7 but the number of people who get excited when there's a breakthrough in a particular scientific or technological field can be counted on one hand (and multiplied by 10^[2-4]). The explanation is pretty simple: I can get the iPhone 7 when it comes out but it's hard to get excited knowing I might go to Mars in 2060.
I had a similar experience myself. As a human being I'm naturally inclined to, sometimes, consider short-term rewards more valuable than long-term rewards. They say the quickest way to change your lifestyle is to change the environment around you. In the case of software developers that environment is often their gear/tools. In my case it was my laptop. When I was still a student I was using the not-so-crappy-but-still-kind-of-crappy laptop provided by my university. The problem was not the laptop, of course, but the fact that I was doing something I didn't enjoy.
One day, frustrated by the fact that a few Chrome tabs and PyCharm would literally devour RAM and swap alike, I started considering buying a laptop of my own. Fast forward to a couple of months later, and on the edge of a serious depression, I bought a shiny Macbook Pro with 16 GB of RAM. I started getting more into web development (I was doing research in a very specific field of cybersecurity), studied machine learning (and used it for my thesis project), found a very good job (where EVERYBODY was using Apple hardware) and slowly transitioned to doing web development full time.
The Macbook acted as a trigger. I might have gotten the same results by moving to another country, changing house, changing friends, maybe by dropping college altogether, but that shallow, nonetheless very useful, purchase (I'd go as far as to call it an "investment") did the trick. I got my degree, I'm still working, and enjoying what I do, I even moved to another country eventually. Could I have experienced the same thing doing something else? Probably. But it's easy to say so afterwards. :)
A few hours a week dedicated to re-building our deployment process (which was a pain since everything had to be provisioned manually for each new project). Not saying it was the best approach, it sure was an improvement and worth the (relatively little) time.
Once again keep in mind that for new projects the process is so streamlined it will take a fraction of the time to set them up.
There has been a scientific study about what makes people "happy" [1]. It's even something we can easily test personally: relationships. No matter what, relationships create that emotional swing that makes our lives interesting (assuming a psychologically "healthy" person, by today's standards).
That said, how many people actively pursue relationships? To me a person who has tons of friends (the kind you spend time with on trips etc. not the kind you text every once in a while to see how they are doing) but works a frustrating 9-5 job at a bank is definitely not someone I'd look up to. On the other hand a person who is extremely successful in his field, wins the most prestigious award in that field, but does not (again, by today's standards) live a healthy life does not set a good example either [2]. So what's the optimal situation?
And appearances don't help. I have no idea whether Elon Musk (since he was mentioned in another comment) is happy. I just know he looks successful. In my mind he's the kind of guy that enters a room and automatically and instantly gets the respect and admiration of the "smart" people in there. Does he even care about that? Am I being tricked into seeing Elon Musk as a status symbol like I'm tricked into seeing the iPhone as one of the best smartphones out there?
Happiness is definitely more complex than accepting what you do as "special". Accepting your current situation is a great way to start clearing up the cloud of things you consider important but if that was really the way to be happy why would we even bother improving ourselves or society? I hate to say this but I almost feel like this is the classic story of the fox and the grapes. When the fox can't reach the grapes says they are not ripe.
What if happiness was about pursuing something, regardless of the end result?
Exactly. Docker provides a set of features that are nice to standardized development environments and deployments across projects. Anything else that accomplishes that works as well.
To answer the concerns raised in the comments: we are a real company and it took 2 weeks (while working on other features and bugfixes) to migrate to Docker. The plus is that now we have experience with the platform and we can streamline the process. Again: we are not using microservices or anything like that, simply Docker containers instead of EC2 instances, which makes life pretty damn easier (and cheaper).
And 25 and 75 are bogus numbers, what if we start running 10 instances?
1) Small teams (~1-5 people) trying to seem "big" by working at Google's scale.
2) Heroku's prices. We are currently (successfully so far) migrating a small Django project from bare Amazon EC2 instances to ECS with Docker. Even using 3 EC2 micro instances (1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM) for the Docker cluster we would spend ~8 USD/month/instance. With Heroku the minimum would be 25 USD/month/dyno. That's a 3x increase in expenses.
It's very possible to take advantage of technologies like containers without getting too caught in the hype.
If working in the SV for such big companies (Google in primis I guess) why do so many people want to work there? Is it just the "brand" effect or it's really worth it (salary and perks aside)?
Most of the issues described in the article are solved by projects like [0], [1] and [2]. [2] was particularly easy to work with (tried it with a standard installation of Django CMS and it was working very well, only in US regions) and the advantage is that you can still work locally as you would usually do, even keep a testing environment for CI on a managed server, and just replace the production server with it.
"Until a 4+ inch iPhone screen appears, and then adoring iFans will line up to call it revolutionary, exciting, even magical. And when those outside the Reality Distortion Field point out that other manufacturers did it first and Apple was only catching up to the competition, they'll say "yeah but Apple was the one who finally got it right". Presumably, by putting an Apple logo on the back."
When average people predict historical events. Hilarious!