Christmas Present Ideas for Software Developers

Updated with more suggestions!

Christmas is literally around the corner! So if you haven’t got any idea of what buy your software developer/programmer friends then perhaps this post is going to help you a lot.

Buying gifts isn’t always easy as we don’t always know what the other person likes, it happens to me as well and a lot of the time I have to look around the internet for some inspiration. So, today’s post is designed to help you get some ideas of what to get, I guarantee that these suggestions are things that developers would like.

Raspberry Pi

As you know this one is my personal favourite, you can literally do so much with this little machine. Ranging from personal server, retro gaming platform, programming and much more. Plus there are quite a bit of articles about it in this blog :)

This is probably the perfect tool to unleash his/her creativities.

Banana Pi

I haven’t try this one myself, but I have to admit I really want to get my hands on this one. The Banana Pi is supposed to be a fork of Raspberry Pi with beefier spec. We are talking about 1GB RAM and dual core processor.

Therefore with those specs above, it opens up more possibilities for “heavier” stuff such as sharing servers and better emulations.

Pebble Steel

Possibly the pioneer of the smartwatches these days and still holds the record for battery life as far as I know. The steel is one good looking smartwatch and would be a perfect Christmas gift.

Moto 360

Moto 360 is one of the better looking smartwatches around. One of the defining points is the round face of the watch, which makes it look like a conventional watch yet extremely futuristic. Anyone would be happy to receive this watch :)

Parrot Drone

This is the definition of fun for developers, the drone works straight away out of the box. It is equipped with HD camera which streams directly to your phone or tablet and connection is done via ad-hoc wifi connection with your device. It just works, which is great.

In addition to the big parrot drone, there is also the parrot mini drone, which flies and also rolls around on the ground! If flying drone isn’t really for him/her though, check out also the Parrot mini drone jumping sumo.

Kindle Fire HDX

This is a great tablet for its price. Look at other brands and you’ll spend more then $700 easy, but this Kindle Fire HDX only cost $379 at the time of this writing. One of the better things to be gifted, great screen and performance tablet and of course it’s especially great if the one you are giving likes reading e-books. Oh and because of the 8.9inch dimension, I think it’s going to be a perfect comic reader too!

System 76 Ubuntu Laptop

This one is a slightly different gift option. There are lots and lots of Windows and Apple computers out there but not much native Ubuntu laptops. I think this one is quite a novel gift for someone who does a lot of software development, especially web development.

The best thing about having a full Linux laptop is that every one of his/her web development tool and platform would work natively straight away. No need to use Cygwin since the terminal would be native!

High Capacity NAS

Like all developers, space is an important thing. We like to store things especially media files and that can be huge. We also like to be able to access these files from everywhere around the house, therefore a network area storage. This is something that should work straight away, so if he/she doesn’t have time to build his/her own NAS using Raspberry Pi or something like that, then this is a good option.

Robot Movies

Okay, this is probably not for everyone, but if he/she happens to like movies with robots in it, checkout giantrobotmovies.com for movie suggestions, you’ll find something interesting in there.

X-Mini Speakers

These are genuinely awesome speakers and perfect for gifts. They may be small but their sound quality is good and the battery life is quite amazing in my opinion. If you are looking for something under $30 the look no further, just grab one of these and it’s hard to go wrong.

Closing

I hope this post helps you with gift ideas for this Christmas. The above are definitely cool stuff that you can give to a software developer/programmer or just tech enthusiast in general!

I’ll add more things in this post if I think of more interesting things.

Categorised in: Coding, Fun computing, Raspberry Pi, Tools, Ubuntu