PocketSmith

So about three weeks ago now, I spilled beer on my MacBook Pro (which was at the time less than a month old) on a Friday. Don’t worry about berating me; I did enough of that in the hours that followed. Luckily there was no great *poof* of the magic smoke escaping and I turned everything off, mopped up as much as I could, and let it sit to dry overnight.

Next day everything started up perfectly, however some liquid had gotten in the LCD of my beloved laptop; while this dried up over the next few days there was still a decent amount of residue that was extremely frustrating. So I called the good people who provide my household insurance, and luckily enough this level of amazing stupidity is covered under my policy. I think I even paid for it in my premium, I believe it is a policy addition called “Clumsy Fool Cover”. Everything packed up and sent away to them.

In the interim I reverted to my trusty 1.42GHz iBook, which meant that I could continue working and coding on PocketSmith. Now I do say I could continue working, however I wasn’t able to be as productive as I once was; I had very quickly forgotten how painfully slow this pretty-up-there laptop from 2005 could be. Solid as a rock, but some activities take forever.

And being in heavy development mode at the moment, there is a lot of restarting local servers, refreshing pages, and heavy calculations being performed by the local server on the iBook. Whereas previously a quick change of the application’s environment, a restart of the local server, and page refresh would have taken around ten seconds on the new shiny MacBook Pro; the process would take around one and a half minutes on the iBook.

The machine was so slow that at the end of the time with the iBook I had taken to actually pushing changes I made locally up to the live server using Git to test changes, because it was actually faster to do things in this round-about away!

Another example; we are using the (fantastic) services of Y-Combinator startup company Heroku for the hosting of the application in these early stages (and hopefully the later stages as well; more on this later). They have this pretty nifty in-browser editor for rails projects you have in Heroku. And I thought it was broken; loading the editor would take 45 - 60 seconds each page refresh, with the page slowly coming together and being functional in about the time it takes to make a cup of tea. Well, a very quick and messy cup of tea, but a cup of tea nonetheless. I had initially thought there was something wrong with the way that Firefox was caching the Javascript. How wrong I was.

It was simply the length of time that it took for the iBook to use the Javascript to render the page; once I got my MacBook Pro back (new top-shell, screen and left hand side speaker, hoorah!) I realised how blazing-fast the interface was, like 15 times faster.

Funny thing is that at the outset I was wondering if I should bother with a Macbook Pro or whether we could start this thing with myself on the iBook. So now I know - if I had taken that decision, we would still be in pre-alpha instead of rushing headfirst into the beta

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 11:47 am and is filed under Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.