The Laptop Showed Up. Here’s What I Installed First.

The new laptop arrives today.

A Lenovo X1. I’ll get into the why and the backstory another time… For now, what matters is the box is open, the screen is on, and the “no laptop” chapter is officially over.

I wrote about losing the old one a while back. The GitHub app and github.dev carried me through — draft, paste, commit, all from a phone. It worked. But it’s not the same as sitting down with a real keyboard and a real screen, and I feel that the moment I open the lid.

So today is a setup day. And setup day always brings back the same question, the one I get asked more than almost anything else: if someone’s starting from zero, what do they actually need to install to build a website?

Not a framework opinion. Not a stack debate. Just the floor. The tools that get you from nothing to a working fullstack app.

Here’s the list:

1. VS Code — the editor. Free, and it’s where you’ll write everything.
2. Git — version control. You don’t need to understand all of it on day one. You need it installed so you can start building the habit of committing your work.
3. Node — lets JavaScript run outside the browser. This is what turns “a webpage” into “an app.”
4. A browser — Chrome is fine, but it doesn’t have to be. Safari, Firefox, even Explorer if that’s genuinely what’s on your machine. The browser is where you check your work, not where the magic happens.

That’s it. Four installs, all free, all still true today as far as I know — though I’ll admit I haven’t checked if there’s a newer “correct” way to do this. There might be. This is just the path that still works.

From there, it’s HTML for structure, CSS for how it looks, and JavaScript for how it behaves. Learn those three properly and you can build a fullstack web app — not a toy, an actual working product — with nothing else in your toolkit.

No course, no bootcamp, no $200 setup guide required to get to that starting line. Just those four tools and the willingness to sit with HTML, CSS, and JS until they stop looking like a foreign language.

The new machine changes how fast I move. It doesn’t change what I’d tell someone on day one.

More to come — including what actually went into choosing this laptop.

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