Working at Octopus - a story of silicon and steel

Shane Gill reflects on his fifth anniversary at Octopus and his experience with the company's computer policy, which allows employees to upgrade their hardware every few years. Throughout his career at Octopus, Gill has transitioned from using a MSI WS60 laptop, balancing power and portability, to a more powerful but less portable Metabox Prime laptop to accommodate remote work and performance investigations. For his anniversary, he built a custom desktop, Octobox-V, designed to be a powerful yet silent code compiling workstation, featuring a Ryzen 7 2700X, 32GB DDR4 3200, RTX 2070, and a combination of PCIe and SATA storage. This setup significantly reduced compile times by 65% and eliminated fan noise, while still allowing him to play StarCraft, a game he admired since his youth. For remote work, he uses an ultrabook to connect to Octobox-V via VPN, achieving both performance and portability without compromise.