What hardware I use?
I use a pretty simple and old MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Early 2015) for my day to day programming. I also have an HP Pavillon 15-inch with Linux Ubuntu OS as my secondary laptop, 2 1TB hard drives and a Google Home device
What software do I use?
For development, I use a mix of Sublime Text, iTerm, Bash, Tmux and Vim. I recently download VS Code to check out what the hype was about but it didn’t stick (probably because I was lazy to try something new). For mobile development, I use the Android Studio and XCode IDEs.
I use Things as a personal todo/schedule/life management tool. Spotify for music, iTunes for podcasts, Headspace for meditation, and Trello, Slack, GitHub, GSuite as work tools. Honourable mention goes to Google Calendar - almost every hour of my week is planned on my GCal synced between 3 email accounts.
I like using Postman for testing APIs and I prefer using Zeplin for receiving designs from UI designers. I have 4 browsers installed (Chrome, Firefox, Brave and Safari). Until recently, I often use Chrome as default, Firefox and Safari for testing web pages but I’m recently adopting Brave as my default browser. I’d really appreciate a simple, easy to access tool that helps you test for other browsers (Edge, IE, etc.). I recently had to make a Vue/Foundation website work on IE 13 and my experience testing on a remote platform such as BrowserStack wasn’t so great.
As a remote company, we’ve also recently adopted Zoom for our voice and video calls as Slack breaks down with more than 3 - 4 people on a call.
I recently uninstalled Cold Turkey and started using the Focus app for keeping my Twitter addiction at bay and I’m loving the experience so far.
What would be my dream setup?
My dream setup would involve replacing my 2 laptops with newer models and bigger screens. I’d also like to have a noise-cancelling headset and a standalone display (for when I become less nomadic). For software, I’d love a more intuitive integration of Things and Google Calendar.
This post first appeared in a writing series with my colleagues at Happy Bear Software.