This is the time of year when I reliably gnash my teeth. I hate it when development tools autoupdate instead of asking for permission first. I’m looking at you, Xcode. Xamarin is even worse. Oh, Xamarin. At least I’ve had enough experience now to have some idea of what’s going wrong when you start throwing cryptic error messages out of the blue. New OS release? Oh yeah.
Yes, I know it’s good to get people to update to the new stuff. Yes, I know that if you give them a solid nudge, that many of them will never update, ever, and will expect you to support your older versions forever. But I hate how easy Apple makes it to accidentally turn on autoupdate for something, and there seems to be no way to turn it off.
Speaking of versions, if you want to do mobile development, get used to the idea that you are likely to need two to three versions of the IDE available at any given time. (Except Xamarin, dang it.) (Yes, you can run multiple versions of Xcode on one machine. Yes, it can get a little wonky sometimes.) This can end up taking up quite a bit of disk space.
For example, I currently have the following applications that I use for daily work: Xcode 9.2, Xcode 8.3.3, Xcode 7.3.1 (about to retire this one!), Android Studio 1.5 (about to retire this one!), Android Studio 2.3.1 (also about to retire), Android Studio 3.0.1 (need to get the latest), the full Microsoft Office Suite for Mac, Photoshop, SourceTree, Sketch, Sublime Text, Slack, Safari, Firefox, Chrome, Fabric, Navicat, Postman, Transmit, and Visual Studio. That’s not counting the extra text editors or a small collection of image optimization apps and random tools.
The moral of the story is that, when you get the chance to spec out a development machine, get all the disk space you can get your hands on.
Sam Herdman 