What Hardware Is Essential for Back End Developers to Be Competitive Today?
What hardware is critical for back end developers today? What upgrades are important?
As a developer, the hardware you use is at the core of your freelance, contractor, and back end development career.
For freelance back end developers especially, your hardware must adequately meet the array of technical demands of client projects and needs. The reality is, as a freelancer, you are your own tech support.
Your role more than most requires a powerful system capable of running multiple applications, windows, and tools simultaneously.
Advancing in your career requires staying up-to-date with the hardware upgrades required to keep your laptop running smoothly, to manage multiple projects.
"The Essential 3": Hardware Requirements for Back End Developers Today
The freelance economy in general includes about one billion professionals worldwide, per Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 2020. Back end developers comprise about 55% of technical freelancers. The number is expected to continue to grow, as more businesses harness contractor and freelancer support.
As a back end developer, your work includes multiple types of projects. In a workday, you might do any or all of the following work:
- Develop application architecture
- Manage databases
- Oversee and troubleshoot server management
- Creating RESTful APIs
To remain competitive, no matter what stage of your career, the following three components are essential, and the foundation of a powerful computer, to support the myriad development work you perform:
- Superior processing performance
- Ample memory
- High-storage capacity
To some extent, both your keyboard and monitor are important considerations. However, these are upgrades you can make that aren't necessarily as vital as the power and performance of your internal hardware. Learn what today's hardware specification requirements are to keep your system-and business-running smoothly.
Powerful Processing: No Less Than an 8 Core CPU
Your computer's core processing unit (CPU) must perform optimally for work that requires running multiple test environments and applications. The more cores your system has, the more it is able to simultaneously process multiple tasks and applications, for higher performance, and less crashes. Likewise, the more threads a processor has the better.
Seek Dual Core Processing: More and more CPUs today have dual core processing, and this is recommended for back end developers. In other words, one core has two threads, four cores has eight threads, and so on.
Dual processing enables your system to handle a process by creating a thread, or virtual core. The more threads you have, the more your system can execute tasks in a process, which makes your machine execute tasks and information faster.
Ensure Fast CPU Cycle-Speed: Additionally, processing speed is also important to consider. Your CPU is the heart of your system. Clock speed measures how fast your CPU cycles, or executes information and tasks, per second. This is measured in MHz or GHz, (megahertz or gigahertz). The key here is the faster the clock speed, the better.
Recommendation: No less than 8 cores, 16 thread CPU is a good standard for a fast system.
HP Dev One laptop offers the AMD Ryzen 7 PRO processor, 1TB of SSD storage*, and 16GB with 3200MHz. See how powerful a portable development environment system can be.
Ample Storage: Aim for 16GB RAM and Above
As a back end developer, your job is a balance between projects and tasks through your work day. Therefore, enough memory is critical for many of the applications you likely use.
Random access memory (RAM) enables your laptop to perform smoothly, creating commands, loading applications, and running these applications simultaneously. Certain applications, as well as operating systems, are known to take-up more memory. To that end, more memory supports your processing speed.
Back end Development Work That Consumes RAM: Back end development requires enough memory to meet the demands of your daily work. Certain applications and tasks require a lot of memory:
- Game development and gaming
- Having a number of browsers open
- Creating deep learning networks and some AI apps
Recommendation: 16GB of RAM is a safe starting point for a professional system. Keep in mind, however, that a powerful CPU is always the first step to ensuring your system is fast.
Opt for an SSD Upgrade: High-Capacity SSD Storage for On-the-Go Work
Historically, the hard disk drive (HDD) was the starting point for storage capacity for many back end developers. Storage is imperative for managing various projects at the same time, and overall. It was a norm that at some point, adding more storage to your system was a necessary upgrade.
These days, single-state-drives (SSD) are much faster, and portable. For an on-the-go back end developer, they are therefore a requirement for handling large amounts of data at higher speeds. They're also lighter, meaning that the machine is lighter, and stays cooler, which better enables mobile work, on your laptop.
In addition, an SSD tends to be more secure, and according to one study, is less prone to failure-for new models. Because SSDs are respectively new in contrast to HDDs, HP recommends updating your system for professional use every 3 to 5 years, to ensure reliability for back-up storage, fast booting, and for optimal operating experience.
On the whole,an SSD outperforms HDD, and is less noisy when working in a remote location. They enable your computer to boot faster, and retrieve programs more quickly.
Recommendation: The baseline for storage today should be no less than 512GB. For developers, particularly those who work in gaming, deep learning, and with multiple projects, going the distance with 1TB of storage is recommended.
The Future of Back End Development Requires Powerful Hardware
As a back end developer, maintaining the most critical hardware for your set-up is key to meeting the growing demand for contract and freelance developer support.
In addition, every component working together, designed for the work you do, decreases the time you take in managing your system, so you can focus on building your career, and developing the projects that are important to you.
Learn how the new HP Dev One is designed for the work you do. Powerful processing, storage, and support all on your laptop.
