Uses

Image of my desk, comprising my macbook, 2 screens, a keyboard and various clutter

Having just set up a new M1 MacBook Air (loving it so far) I thought it was time I created this page summarising the various things I use day to day. These things have slowly changed over time during my career and will change again in the future.

Editor, Terminal, Browser etc.

  • Visual Studio Code has been my bread and butter for maybe 5 years now, you can pry it from my cold dead hands.
  • I've customised VSC with years of settings tweaks and extensions to tailor it to my needs. Let me know if there's an extensions I should know about!
  • I prefer dark themes for everything and I'm almost always using Dracula 🧛‍♂️.
  • I use ZSH as my shell, alongside the Spaceship prompt which is a Rust powered prompt that provides some extra sugar.
  • I'm an annoyingly vocal Firefox fan 🦊, not only due to their best in class dev tools and focus on user privacy but because everything else is running on Chromium and Blink now, the web needs a competing browser engine.
  • All my dev tools use the Fira Code font as I like the ligatures and find it very readable.
  • I store my various OS and software configs and setup scripts in my dotfiles repo. Feel free to use it as inspiration but it's obviously for my own uses and may not be appropriate for you.

What's on my desk?

I have too many computers at the moment and I'm working on simplifying everything. I'm an OS polyglot though prefer a *nix environment for dev work. All my *nix knowhow is self taught though, always learning and breaking things as I go....

My desk currently contains any of the following:

  • 🍏 M1 MacBook Air as my primary development machine. It's the pink one 🤘.
  • 💻 Windows desktop, mostly for gaming. BIOS and storage drives are a mess from too much multi-OS booting.
  • 💻 Microsoft Surface Go with pen, which I love but it's niche has been replaced by the MBA, poor thing. Great for taking notes and reading ebooks though.

These are alongside various peripherals:

  • 🖱️ A logitech MX Master 3, the best mouse I've ever used.
  • ⌨️ Keychron K6 mechanical, fun to type on and has pretty lights.
  • ⌨️ Microsoft surface ergonomic, pure bliss for the hands and wrists.
  • 🖥️ I'm sorely lacking in monitors, using some cheap, mismatched 1080p screens. But this will be my next hardware investment for sure.
  • 📷 Logitech C920 webcam. Glad I bought this a few years back before all quality webcam stocks disappeared.
  • 🎧 Sony WH-1000 XM3 bluetooth headphones. Ridiculous noise cancelling, very comfortable (unless it's hot weather) and multi day battery life.