Don't Fight the Current

When I was about to join a new team at another company, I learned that all the developers were using MacBooks. Meanwhile, I was firmly rooted in the Android and Windows world. I had zero experience with macOS, and zero interest in switching.

So I didn’t. I chose a Windows laptop, confident I could make it work. How hard could it be to set up a dev environment and find macOS alternatives?

Turns out, very hard.

For the next 1.5 years, I ran WSL 2, hunted down app alternatives, and built my own workflows from scratch. My setup worked, technically—but it came at a cost. I was constantly troubleshooting, Googling obscure errors, and navigating issues my teammates couldn’t help with because our systems were too different.

That extra friction showed up in my work. I had to regularly overestimate timelines just to give myself buffer for setup and workaround time. On paper, it made me look like a sluggish developer, consistently taking longer than average. My direct manager understood, but I knew it wasn't a good look with the higher-ups, as there was no easy way to communicate this up the chain.

You might wonder: once it’s all set up, doesn’t it get easier?

Partially, yes—but nothing stays still in tech. New, groundbreaking tools are introduced all the time, and our team’s processes were often updated to include them—always designed for macOS first. For me, that meant finding alternatives, getting them approved by IT and Security, and then starting my actual work. It was a never-ending treadmill of catch-up.

Eventually, I realized that my stubbornness was hurting my career more than it was helping my comfort. So, I switched to a MacBook.

I took a couple of weeks of official "training" to make it clear that I was learning a new platform. Immediately, the experience changed. When I ran into issues, teammates could actually help. I could dive into work instead of battling my setup.

My biggest lesson wasn’t about technology, but about trade-offs. Letting go of personal preferences isn’t a defeat; it’s about setting yourself up for success—and your team, too. Exploration and challenging the norm are important, but when you fight the current for too long, you risk drifting further from where you’re trying to go.