Web development does not require a particularly powerful computer—you’ll mostly be editing text files and using a web browser.
That said there are some minimum requirements you’ll need to meet to get the most out of the course.
The most important thing is having a consistent terminal environment. macOS and Linux are both based on Unix and so have a standardised command-line environment. This is useful because most things will work cross-platform . Also pretty much all cloud platforms use Linux, so the places you are deploying code will work the same way.
Windows has a totally different command-line. The underlying OS is different enough that you will encounter issues even with very popular tools.
This is changing with Windows Subsystem for Linux, which lets you run a Linux system within Windows. It’s still very new but looks promising for standardised development on Windows.
We’d recommend Windows users try running Ubuntu within WSL2. If that doesn’t work then try dual-booting a full copy of Ubuntu alongside Windows.
We recommend using a Mac laptop or a Windows laptop with a Linux environment.
Modern JavaScript apps rely on lots of 3rd-party modules that get installed into your project. This means that although you might only have a few of your own files, you could well have hundreds of megabytes in your node_modules folder per project.
The React Week workshops and project alone can take up almost 1GB of space.
We recommend a minimum of 5GB of free space on your laptop. You can probably work with less than this but you’ll have to be diligent about deleting older projects.
You’re going to be spending a lot of time in a web browser, usually with many tabs open. Modern browsers can be pretty memory-hungry (looking at you Chrome), so having more RAM tends to make for a smoother experience. If your laptop runs out of RAM it’ll start suspending apps/tabs in the background, which isn’t ideal.
We recommend your laptop has a minimum of 4GB of RAM. You can’t really have too much here though, 8GB would probably be ideal.