Ask HN: What's the best way to separate work and personal projects on a Mac? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the best way to separate work and personal projects on a Mac?

4 pointssaadatq7 comments

I've started using my "work" MacBook Pro for passion /side projects (really don't want to carry two laptops around), and I'm just curious if any developers have advice for how to separate work/fun projects.

Do you just create a separate account on the Mac?

View on HN

Do you own the machine? If not, I wouldn't build any personal projects on them unless you don't mind your company owning them.

On my machine (which I own), I just keep them in different folders. I tend to use the same environments for work and side projects.

What problems are you having keeping them separate?

Macbook Pros are powerful - working in virtual machines is usually a good experience, given the right virtualization software (i.e. you can do better than VirtualBox). Using a VM for work or personal, and the host machine for the other, has been sufficient for me in most cases. As for which one you put in a VM, that depends on the nature of your work compared to that of your personal projects.

To add to this: If you're comfortable with command-line utilities, Vagrant is amazing for VM management.

Thanks! Using Vagrant already.

How about dual-booting? A Macbook Pro will boot from an SD card or USB 3.0. You can happily run OS X from an SSD in a USB 3.0 enclosure. Just hold down the 'option' key during power-up.

As others have said, you could use virtualisation software. However, this will only work if you're happy installing that on your regular hard drive, and if you don't need hardware-accelerated graphics in an OS X guest.

What's wrong with seperate accounts? Provides the right level of easily switching between projects vs. too hard to switch when distracted.

> Do you just create a separate account on the Mac?

Yes. It's the easiest option and you can always remove the personal account if work doesn't allow it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com