Hardware

• 16” MacBook Pro. It has an M2 chip. I like it a lot.
• A 104 key WASD V2 with MX Blues. It’s big and clacky and I love it.
• 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 gaming laptop at home. Not the cheapest way to get a decent gaming rig, but boy is it pretty.
• 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 try to get into neovim once a year or so. It sticks a little more each time.
• The majority of my note-taking and journaling is done in Obsidian. 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 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.
• 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.
• While a lot of people dig Postman, I use RapidAPI to interact with and test APIs. It’s feature-rich and works almost exactly the way I want it to.
• 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.
• I have a dotfiles repo to make my configuration as consistent as possible between systems.
• Rectangle for arranging my windows on MacOS. I like to use the “Almost Maximise” feature to give myself a little border of desktop wallpaper. I didn’t agonise over choosing pretty pictures just to hide them forever.

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