Setting up a Macbook Pro for Programming

Key Takeaways

I just bought the M4 MacBook Pro and yes, this thing is a beast. So, to start out, I tear open the back seals. Slowly slide off the top and voila. Now, it's time to do the unraveling. Everything feels so smooth and honestly, it's such a relief not to have a dusty laptop for once. It just cost me $4,000. Then, I go through the regular steps of configuring my MacBook Pro, Wi-Fi, network, Apple ID. Of course, I had to pause in awe at the Apple Intelligence. All right, now that we have the base level configurations for this Mac, we're going to start downloading apps. And the first thing I'm going to download is Google Chrome. It's the superior browser. You got to have it. So, now I have it installed. The first thing that I'm going to download as a programmer is warp.dev. This is pretty much a terminal, but it uses AI. When you're downloading a lot of configurations, typically you have to use a lot of terminal commands to understand what's going on in the background of your laptop and all this like complicated nonsense, frankly, because as a programmer, you should just focus on actually writing good code. So, I'm going to use this application called Warp. It has Claude integrated into it so it can understand my English. And I'm going to tell it exactly what I want, download it, and it'll do that. So, first I'm going to get Java. So, it sees I don't have homebrew and then it's going to suggest exactly the terminal command I need to run it. And it's pretty much running all the commands. I used to struggle a lot with terminal, especially when starting computer science, so this has been a real game changer for me. Plus, it's free for now, I think. I'll also show you how to quickly spin up projects using this. It's phenomenal. In the meanwhile, I'm going to start cleaning up my screen because I don't like all these random things. I never use that mail. I don't do maps. Calendar, I use Google Calendar typically. Context, definitely don't need that. Reminders, nah. Apple TV, who uses that? Music. Nope. Spotify. News. Who reads the news here? Keynote. I don't even know what that does. Numbers. Who uses that? Pages. Nah. Everything else can stay. Although I might minimize it a little bit. So, it's still going through downloading the homebrew. It's installing Open JDK. I don't even know what this does, but I don't need to know. Whatever it says. Yes, I'll do that. Perfect. Java has been installed. Next up, we got to install Python. I like to be nice. I think it's also installing pip with it. All right, sweet. So, installed Python. It installed pip. So, now I can deal with all the packages and all that. Now, we got to really ensure that we're ready to program. So, we're going to have it actually create a machine learning project for me. And while it's running the commands, I might go ahead and like download other things in the meanwhile. So, here, let me say this. Create a machine learning prediction project using mock data to predict weather trends in New York City. Use the sklearn library in Python. So this is actually going to go ensure I have all the packages. Creates it super nicely. So all I have to go do is actually tweak the models. Makes developing projects super easy and all y'all should be doing this nowadays. So it's installing numpy, pandis, sklearn, and mattplot lib. It's creating plan for me to do this and then it goes ahead and does it. All right, sweet. So it generated the code for me. Apply changes. I didn't even review it. And now it's actually going to run the Python file. All right, here's my machine learning project. So depending on the date, it predicts the temperature and it uses historical data of the last 90 days and forecasting current data or I guess this is also past data given what date it is today. But it is pretty solid. I mean I have no reference point because this is all mock data. But it's just pretty cool how it can spin up a project that typically would take people sometimes weeks to generate. It's able to do it just like that. Produce a nicel looking graph. I mean this is clearly understandable. And then it even gives you performance metrics. Now the goal for you and any computer science student, you want to use tools like this to create meaningful projects in which you have meaningful data and it's actually helping something more significant than just weather prediction. Maybe it's like a local business. Maybe it's your own startup. Maybe it's something else. But do something, quantify your impact, add it to your resume, you'll be a good programmer. But to really look through and actually enjoy the code, we need to download an IDE. So we're going to download VS Code. And of course, I got Warp to do it for me. All right. So, it's been successfully installed and it's available in my applications folder. Yeah. So, I'm going to say open the weather prediction project in VS Code. All right. So, these are the graphs and this is the code. And now, as any good programmer, you need to download Git or I think it's install Git. Let's see. It's been successfully installed. So, within VS Code, there are a bunch of different extensions that I think are really useful. The first one is going to be Copilot. So this is basically your AI pair programmer. It can make suggestions. It can complete code out for you. And now here in VS Code, I can ask Copilot any questions. I'll just say something like, can you add an extra parameter keywords in the build and evaluate model function? This is just for demo purposes. I really don't need this. And now I can apply the changes. And just like that, it added the parameter I needed. and it shows me exactly what the changes are. And I'll just say keep. So now this makes me a really efficient programmer because I can set up things very quickly using AI. And now I can actually code things out and enhance things very easily with AI. Once again, the next thing you got to download is Adobe Acrobat Reader. As a good programmer, obviously our code needs to be good, but we also need to make sure our documents are all in set. And if we're given large amounts of documentations, which could happen sometimes, need to be able to deal with that in an efficient manner. And for that, Acrobat Reader is so good. I'll give you an example. Like say you're a student and you're like studying your notes. You upload the document into this and you can just click generative summary and it processes it and starts generating you a summary. So here I uploaded some notes about data structures and algorithms and it's like okay understanding the Q data structure. It's a first in first out order basis blah blah blah and it's super cool like that. There's also an AI assistant feature where I can ask questions like what is the time complexity of adding to a queue. Let's see what it says. Okay, it gives me the answers. Plus, it gives me a citation of exactly where to find it within the document. So, it understands it super well. This is very effective for erd PRD type works or any technical documentation or artifacts in general because you're going to be dealing with a large amount of stuff. Or if you're a student and just want to study better, I think it's perfect. Personally, if I was a student in 2025, I would use this. Next up, we need something to keep us organized. So, we're going to download Notion. I really started getting into this because of the complexity of the nature of my work, both like my regular work tasks and then all this content creation stuff and as it scales up and as I'm dealing with different teams and people to help me manage things, it's just been such a big help. So, here we have notion. I have a couple different boards and they each help me with different tasks. So, this one is my personal one. This is for me to manage all the different tasks that I have. Whether it's like filming a YouTube video, whether it's doing a task for work, whether it's filming a real for Instagram. I have one that's dedicated towards the team that helps me manage my YouTube channel. And we have all different types of content. Some of which have not been released yet, some of which who have. This just keeps us organized right here. I have one for my LinkedIn team. They help me kind of put together my ideas in an easy to understand way. And they sometimes help me with graphics. But overall, when you're dealing with a large amount of people and you're kind of like the head running everything, you need to be very, very organized, otherwise things can really hit the fan really fast. I also invested in Notion AI. Now, I can't say that this is the best. I honestly there are some things that I don't like about it. But if you want to say make a table with four columns, not started, started almost done, and done. It can generate a table for you pretty quickly. and you can manage your tasks depending on what your workflow is. You know, you always got to use AI to supercharge your workflow. Now, there's another tool that I've heard a lot of buzz about, but I've never tried. It's called Rectangle, which supposedly helps you create keyboard shortcuts to be very efficient here on the MacBook. Oh, this is cool. So, this is able to move around my settings from left to right. Command 7. Oh, this is cool. This can move things up. Yeah, I'm not really sure how I'm going to use this too much in the future, but hey, I gave it a shot. Let me know if you guys would use it. Well, that was my AI minimalistic setup for programmers. I really hope that you guys enjoyed this video, and if you did, make sure to hit the like button, subscribe if you haven't already. If you're interested in my absolutely free tech newsletter, the link will be down below somewhere in the description. And if you're interested in what software engineers actually do on a day-to-day basis, you might like this video right