You're literally wasting money and your brain by forcing yourself to work on downsized hardware.
Studies are consistent here.
Time you spend waiting? Distracts you from your tasks, overall focus drops -- you're dumber.
Less screen real-estate? More working memory dedicated to what's not on screen -- you're dumber.
http://penguindreams.org/blog/msi-ws60-running-linux/
Scala development, and some devs ops stuff that required spinning up VMs. I mean not a lot; like 6 ~ 8.
At work, I use a 16GB ram laptop, Scala development an no VMs (we do everything in Docker and deploy to Mesos/Marathon).
I do have a desktop at home now with 32GB of ram, but it honestly feels like overkill and I may scale down. There is a lot of dev work that does require a pretty beefy workstation, but I've been doing HD video editing, Photoshop/Lightroom and Scala/Java work on laptops for years.