My Laptop is Older Than My Career: The Hustle of Coding on Ancient Machines

The Boot-up Prayer Ritual

It all starts with a deep breath and a silent prayer. You press the power button and wait. And wait. And wait. It’s a bonding moment between you and your 2014 HP Pavilion—you’ve done this dance so many times, you know which flicker means hope and which one means “get a new charger.”

While others are setting up Docker containers, you’re staring at a loading spinner wondering if today’s the day it finally gives up. Spoiler: it never does. It just makes you suffer.

VS Code or Photoshop—Pick One

With only 4GB of RAM (2 of which are already emotionally unavailable), you don’t open Chrome and VS Code at the same time unless you’re feeling particularly reckless. One tab on Chrome eats memory like a matatu eats fuel in traffic. You open Figma? Goodbye, keyboard. Goodbye, system. Hello frozen screen and the haunting whirr of your laptop’s desperate fan.

You’ve learned to choose your software battles wisely.
Need to check Stack Overflow? You’re using Firefox Lite.
Want to preview a design? You’re exporting low-res images and praying.
Multitasking? That’s for people with SSDs and self-esteem.

The Fan That Screams Like a Demon Possession

At this point, your laptop fan has a personality. You name it. You talk to it. You beg it to calm down during client Zoom calls because it sounds like you’re livestreaming from inside an airplane engine. The client politely ignores it, but deep down, you know they think you’re coding from a generator room in Rongai.

And God forbid you open more than one terminal window—it goes full banshee.

The Art of the “Quick Save” and Frequent Crashes

Ctrl+S is your reflex now. You save after every line of code. Every. Single. Line. Because you’ve lived through unspeakable horrors—hours of lost work because your computer decided to “unexpectedly shut down due to overheating.”

You don’t get mad anymore. You just sit there, blank-eyed, sipping cold tea and wondering if this is what rock bottom feels like.

Thriving in the Struggle

But here’s the twist—you still deliver. That old laptop, held together by hope and cracked hinges, is where your first website came to life. Where your first freelance client sent that M-Pesa message. Where you Googled “how to center a div” and actually figured it out.

And the truth is, that battered machine taught you more than a flashy M1 MacBook ever could. It taught you patience, resourcefulness, and the pure magic of making something out of absolutely nothing.

You’ve become a minimalist developer by necessity. Your tools are lean, your code is clean (because you literally cannot afford messy scripts that slow things down), and your focus is unmatched. While others are bragging about 32GB RAM, you’re out here surviving with four—and still landing clients.

Laptops May Age, Hustlers Don’t

Sure, someday you’ll upgrade. Maybe you’ll even get an ultrabook so light and fast, you’ll forget what lag even feels like. But you’ll always remember the war stories from the trenches. The late nights spent deploying sites on localhost with one hand on your charging cable and the other on the Task Manager, ready to kill anything that dared spike CPU usage.

So if you’re out there coding on a relic, know this: you’re not alone. And you’re not broken. You’re just being forged in fire.

And one day, when you’re sipping coffee in your corner office or DMing clients from a co-working space in Kilimani, you’ll remember your screeching laptop—and smile.