Get yourself a laptop with a 8th gen Core i5 or i7.
I've got the XPS 15 with the smaller battery but with a extra Sata SSD for cheaper storage (256+1TB) as my previous laptop had only 256 and I was constantly running out of storage space and constantly moving VM's and other large files around got tiresome and annoying.
8GB should be fine unless you are going to run VM's on it then 16GB would be a bare mininum.