When I returned to the office after Christmas this year, I opened up VS Code and got busy with some development, but something was not quite right. Before long I realised, Copilot wasn’t working! Despite having only started using it daily a few months earlier, it felt strange to work without it. Of course I can code as I did before, just as I could work without an IDE, typing directly into Notepad, or make do with an 800x600 monitor, but with any productivity boosting advancement, once you experience it, it’s tough to go back.

For years I have been in the Linux-on-the-desktop camp because I find it superior as a development environment. Both because of the tooling (high quality shells such as bash, and integrated package managers like apt and yum), and because of the productivity that comes from having a development environment similar to the target production environment (usually Linux in my experience, especially with the advent of cloud computing). This position was only reinforced by the rise of Docker and containerisation which are primarily Linux based.

Back in 2016, I made a new year’s resolution to write at least one blog post a month. Like many resolutions it didn’t see out the year, stalling in August. In the 4 years since, this blog has remained neglected. In that period of time, I have changed job, changed country and added a couple of children, so the lack of activity perhaps somewhat understandable. At any rate, I have resolved to start blogging again, but without setting specific targets which can only lead to disappointment when they’re not met.