Nerd Glee

So this morning, a FedEx Express (redundant?) truck showed up at my front door promptly at 9:00 to deliver a little bundle of joy: a new workstation.

For as long as I’ve worked, I don’t think I’ve ever received a new development machine from any of the companies I’ve worked for.  To cope with the invariably crappy, last gen machines that I’ve been assigned, I’ve always ended up buying my own.  I bought my own laptop after a few months suffering on an NT4 workstation with something like an 4 GB harddrive and only 100 MB were left for me to work with (this was in 2003, mind you).  I bought my own desktop (a screamer of a machine in its own right) after my laptop became too outdated to handle the resource hungry 2005 suite of software and servers from Microsoft.

The importance of good hardware can’t be emphasized enough.  Fast hardware helps shorten compile times, helps shorten debugging cycles by offering better runtime performance, helps shorten development times by allowing for more installed tools (think ReSharper), and I think, in the big picture, help reduce developer stress and frustration.

As trivial a gesture as this may seem, for the first time, I feel appreciated and I feel like my employer takes my job and tasks seriously.  It’s a truly special moment 😀 It’s as if he understands my pain (well, not so much mine since my machine is less than a year old (dual core @ 3.2GHz, 4GB RAM, 3x10K RPM HDs), but my pain in working with the rest of the team who are still on first gen. Centrino laptops with 4200RPM HDs).

I’ll have to add some pictures later and some screenshots.  For now, I am beyond ecstatic that, finally, our entire team will be able to really be much, much more productive.  I can’t say enough about our once CEO and now VP who really went the distance to make sure that we got some quality hardware.