My experience at a coworking space in Osaka, Japan
whosbacon.com
whosbacon.com
Japanese young folks, in particular, can really use that message. It is not a particularly popular message in Japan, which is largely organized for the benefit of salarymen and supports a few variants like "stay-at-home mothers" and "retired people" but institutionally is almost entirely unaware that there are exotic options like "freelancing."
I generally work out of cafes in Ogaki when not working from my kitchen table, and have been told three times by well-meaning cafe owners "Don't worry kiddo! If you hang in there I'm sure one of these days you'll find a job! Just keep sending those emails!"
However I noticed the place where the Tokyo iOS developer meeting happens every month would be perfect for co-working: many rooms of different sizes, enabling people to set up some group meetings whenever is needed.
Co-working spaces have definitely expanded in the past couple years though. Co-ba in Shibuya and Hub Tokyo in Meguro are two that I have visited that seemed like they had good communities.
Thanks for sharing. I really couldn't tell if this was in Osaka until I saw the pictures of takoyaki being shared. Yup. Only in Osaka!
My favorite co-working space in Japan is Super-Deluxe [1] coworking in the daytime, bar / event space at night. Wish there were more funky spaces like that in the world!
One, co-ba (http://tsukuruba.com/co-ba/) I picked mostly because it was closest to where I was staying. They have 2 floors, one of which is open 24 hours. When you sign up full time they give you an RFID card that lets you into the 24hr floor anytime.
On the non-24hr floor they often organize events that start at 7pm. They also organize many social outings which I find a huge plus.
Also, as a programmer they invited me to be part of the "programming section". I'm not sure what all their activities are but one I enjoyed more than I thought I would. That was, every Friday at 4:30pm, if you wanted to you could participate in a coding exercise.
Someone would propose a very simple programming problem like "write code to draw a multiplication table", something that could be done in a few minutes. Their goal was 30 mins or less. We'd then go over everyone's solutions. I got exposure to languages I hadn't had experience with. I got exposure to solutions that hadn't occurred to me. They'd even ask style questions like "why you name your variables like that" which brought up interesting discussion as well.
Now that has me wondering if USA based co-working spaces are similar.
I also helped at some friends who worked from one of the http://co-lab.jp/
Both of them had rented permanent desks. I just sat at an open table when helping them out. I don't really know what that place was like other than it exists. It was much bigger than co-ba.
Not a co-working space but there's also the Pico Pico Cafe in Kichijoji (http://www.picopicocafe.com/). It's run by the guy making Voxatron (http://www.lexaloffle.com/voxatron.php). It's effectively his office. He opens it 3 days a week as a cafe and works on his projects those days as well.
Actually, we're kind of interested in starting a hacker space in Osaka too as a bunch of people we've hired are from the Hacker/Maker/Open hardware community (Bunnie's novena is our embedded compute). If anyone knows of anyone else who might be interested in working on that please let me know (address is profile).
I bought Airs for my wife and daughter. I would help them with something, then return to my machine, and feel a little more frustrated each time.
Airs have better hardware, better software, a better user experience, and are rock solid (if you don't hit them too hard). They don't get in your way, they just do their thing.
Macs are no-fuss machines that allow you to do your work without requiring you to babysit the machine. I'm no fanboi, I just recognize quality when I use it.
When I first started in my late teens, I was a hard core Linux user. I then moved over to a Thinkpad T40 (which I loved, and still have in a box to this day, with Windows XP on it).
About 4 years ago, I was issued a Macbook Pro while doing work at a DOE lab; I've never gone back since. It just works (as /u/PeterWhittaker stated). I've since bought my parents and my wife Air's.
I really didn't add significantly to the above comment, but wanted to be more verbose than "THIS". There is so much value in a tool that "just works".
I bought my first iMac one month ago, after using HP, Acer, etc. w/ Slackware for years.
Would like to acquire a Macbook Pro soon, just to give you an idea, a Macbook Pro, i7, 16 GB RAM, SSD 512 GB is around 2900 U$ here.
Check with your accountant to see if you can deduct the cost. Or if you can do a business lease on one.
That's impossible. The first Ubuntu release was on October 20th, 2004 - less than 10 years ago.
I cannot remember if I started with Breezy or Dapper, but it was one or the other.
So a long time then: From B or D to September 2013, when my Air arrived.
And worse, the 2 or 3 times a year I want to play a game they don't run it. I managed to play through The Stanley Parable in VMWare Fusion but the game froze around once every 1 to 3 mins. Switching in/out of fullscreen mode would unlock it.
I'm not planning to switch back .. yet .. but I do think about it. Especially as a game dev, unlike webdev most game devs are on Windows.
Still have a MBP because I need to port software to it, but my day-to-day ops are on my Thinkpad.
Plus, trying to get Apache configured on a Windows box, and then transferring that knowledge to a Linux machine in the cloud somewhere, and wondering why everything breaks when you put it on production is really frustrating. (The first time you run into this, it's usually case-sensitive filenames...) Cygwin and MinGW can mitigate this, but add an additional level of complexity that really begs you to just run Ubuntu in a VM or buy a Macbook.
I think the more common thing is that if you are financially secure enough to quit your day job for four months, you probably have enough saved up to buy a Macbook or top-of-the-line Thinkpad. If you have a $500 netbook and you're in a co-working space, waiting for your computer to compile things might not be the most effective use of your time.
Still, I love the hardware of my rMBP. It barely takes up space in my backpack, keyboard is good, don't have to worry about breaking out a mouse because of trackpad, battery life is good enough I often forget to charge it, etc.
I prefer Windows 7 to OS X, but in general I avoid setting up things that should be best done in Linux on either platform, VMs are good enough for most of that.
Plus, people will use what they're familiar with. I see first-year students trying to set up gcc on Windows all the time (because the first-year assignments in my program are written in C; other programs here use Dr. Racket or C#) and it doesn't always end well. I did manage to get Apache set up on Windows back in the early 2000s and at the time it was less effort than setting up dual-boot (but only by a very small margin).
That is true. At my old job they wanted me to do some VM work with the brand new laptop they bought me, didn't have the virtualization extensions and that was that.
Way back when I was in school, Mac laptops were very much not the norm, and when we started working with gcc, the teacher knew to tell everybody to either install linux or cygwin. Everybody installed cygwin. It worked fine enough for what we needed it for.
They really shouldn't sit on those benches and chairs if they care about health.
It's fine to sit on a bench or a chair for a short period of time. You might as well say they shouldn't all be looking at tiny laptop screens that are not at eye level.
In the back of the photo it looks like there are some chairs designed more with ergonomics in mind -- the black ones with mesh backs.
My laptop is my "interface", far more often than my tool itself. I have powerful servers for building, VM's for emulating other environments, I want my laptop to simply be something I'm _VERY_ comfortable with and able to mangle as needed, which usually ends in *nix for me, out of sheer pragmatism. (the windows is for software I have to run that forces a degree of compatibility.)