Hardware

• 15” MacBook Pro (2019) that my company provided.
• Apple Magic Keyboard, also provided by my company. I used to use a mechanical keyboard, but now it feels intolerably thick. Maybe I’ll buy one of those fancy wrist pads and try again some day.
• I used my beloved Anker Gaming Mouse until it broke and I discovered they’d discontinued that model. I splashed out for a Logitech G502 Hero. I’m sure it’s a great mouse, but honestly I’m not good enough at videogames for my mouse to have ever been the bottleneck.
• An MSI gaming laptop at home. It’s some years old now, but still a thing of beauty.
• A notebook with squared or dotted paper. Those diddly little ones are too small and A4 is too big. Roughly A5 size is perfect. Ideally nothing so nice that I’ll feel bad eventually recycling it. The problem with beautiful notebooks is that you want your scribblings to be deserving. That can be stifling.
• A black fineliner or gel ink pen. I’m not picky about the brand, so long as it doesn’t scratch on the paper too much. I always wanted to be the kind of person who has a favourite pen and just stockpiles them, but I’m not there yet.

Software

• RubyMine for serious Ruby work. Visual Studio Code for all other text and code editing.
• I went though various note-taking apps before settling on Obsidian, which I’m obsessed with.
• 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.
• iTerm2 with Oh My Zsh. I wrote a little more about this in a blog post about how I use iTerm2.
• While a lot of people dig Postman, I use RapidAPI (previously Paw) to interact with and test APIs. It’s feature-rich and works almost exactly the way I want it to.
• Todoist for holding chaos at bay.
• 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.
• TechSmith’s SnagIt is brilliant for capturing screen recordings and annotating screenshots. It’s not cheap, but it is good.
• NetNewsWire for subscribing to RSS feeds. It’s pretty much entirely replaced my habit of scrolling through Twitter and I’m happier for it.

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