Laptops and Screens

 Still on the discussion of screens... 

TL;DR: Make sure you can do your Work with just the one laptop screen. 

OK, Jess Parker in Primeval gets an exception granted, because, well, it is Her, and because the makers of the series gave her The Coolest Console. Check the series...

But serious: you will at some point end up in a situation (callout, pager, disaster...) where all you have is the laptop, and no time to go search a hotel with TV-converted-to-monitor.

Of course I do appreciate a good acre of screen real-estate. Any customer that has workplaces with ready-to-plug, good quality screens gets kuddos.

But if you are a multi-customer, travelling, troubleshooting consultant, or a DevOps person for critical infrastructure you should always be prepared to work from "just the laptop".

Some ppl travel with a portable extra screen, but to me that seems Very Impractical, whether you travel by air or by motorcycle (by car/van/camper, you might...). 

In that respect I am fairly lucky: my job is 80% or more still "terminal based". Opening 4 or so terminal windows and a few browser-tabs for messages, some grafana, some documentation, and ... Stack-Overflow (of course lol).

It is also one of the reasons why I will insist that databases (or app-components) stick with CLI (Command Line Interface) operations whenever possible. 

SQL and bash are my main "windows to the world", and "terminal" is the way to view that world.

(and any good container should have the possibility to run "exec -it /bin/sh" for diagnose and preliminary fixes - maybe Not Recommended Practice, but quite useful at times.. topic for a later blog).