The things I use

Hardware

• 16” MacBook Pro. It has an M2 chip. I like it a lot, but it’s a company machine, not mine.
• A 104 key WASD V2 with MX Blues. It’s big and clacky and I love it. It’s a pretty thick keyboard, so I asked someone selling chopping boards at a local market to make me a wrist rest out of black walnut, the best wood. In the almost ten years I’ve had this keyboard I’ve used the numpad maybe half a dozen times, so my next keyboard (if this trooper ever gives up) is going to be a slightly more compact model.
• A Logitech G502 Hero mouse. It’s a great mouse, but I’m not good enough at videogames for my mouse to have ever been the bottleneck. I do love the unlockable scroll wheel for whizzing through long web pages.
• An MSI Raider GE68 gaming laptop at home. Not the cheapest way to get a decent gaming rig, but boy is it pretty. It has a lot of oomph, but it runs pretty hot.
• Jabra Elite 85h (discontinued) cans / Anker Liberty 4 NC ear-buds, depending on whether I’m at home or on the go. The sound quality and noise-cancelling on both are more than good enough for me, and the batteries last for ages on one charge.
• An ECHO MINI for listening to music. Wonderful bit of kit.
• A5 dotted notebook. Zippered Galen Leather cover, which keeps the outside beautiful and the while the inside nice and disposable. This is mostly for work stuff.
• 3.5” by 5.5” notebooks in another Galen wrap. This is for general purpose notes and journaling. Journals get kept, notes get recycled.
• Pens, in descending order of preference:
  • LAMY Safari, currently with a teal Diamine ink.
  • Kaweco Sport Brass.
  • A black fineliner or gel ink pen. I’m not picky about the brand, so long as it doesn’t scratch too much.
  • One of the approximately ten billion random ballpoints I’ve accumulated over the years.

Software I use a lot

• RubyMine for serious Ruby work. Visual Studio Code for all other text and code editing. I try to get into neovim once a year or so. It sticks a little more each time.
• Obsidian for the majority of my note-taking and journaling. For all its wonderful features, it’s essentially a layer on top of a soup of version controlled markdown files. As with this website, it’s important to me that so much of my important data isn’t locked in to a particular vendor or platform.
• Todoist for holding chaos at bay.
• NetNewsWire and Feedbin for subscribing to RSS feeds. It’s pretty much entirely replaced my habit of scrolling through Twitter and I’m happier for it.
• iTerm2 with Oh My Zsh. I wrote a little more about this in a blog post about how I use iTerm2.
• RapidAPI to interact with and test APIs. I just use curl. I like a fancy GUI, but for my needs the overhead of another tool was never justified.
• CleanShot for screenshots and screen recordings. It’s super easy to use and makes capturing quick gifs a breeze.
• jq and jless for wrangling JSON data on the command line.
• I have a dotfiles repo to make my configuration as consistent as possible between systems.

Software I use a little

• Windows Subsystem for Linux whenever I’ve doing web development on a Windows machine. I spent a long time rotating through various Linux distributions, but these days I don’t have the patience or skill to babysit them. And I like video games too much.
• Figma for design work. I’m not a designer, and Figma makes it super easy to put together at least basic wireframes and prototypes without really needing to know what you’re doing.

Software I try to avoid using

• Algorithmic social media and attention economy platforms. They aren’t built for you. That said, I still have accounts and I still check when people send me memes.
• Platforms that lock away data that I will still be interested in after the platform stops existing. For example, I keep lists of books I’ve read and movies I’ve watched. I want to avoid a scenario where that information is only stored in Letterboxd and then Letterboxd disappears.

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