The Setup

There’s a gear-nerd site online called The Setup that interviews notable developers, designers, artists and engineers, with a focus on what equipment they use to Get Stuff Done. I’d like to join the fun too, so here’s some information about my setup.

What hardware do you use?

I use a 13” 1.3GHz i5 MacBook Air with 8GB of memory. I don’t have or need an awful amount of disk space — my machine is mostly for wrangling text in various forms. If I need to store anything large, I have a 2TB external disk.

I’ve somehow managed to build a large collection of audio equipment over the years, but most of it is now redundant since adopting a sort of Bose-or-nothing stance. I shuffle between QC15s (lifesaver!), MIE2is (mostly when driving), and some desktop speakers.

I tend not to use a mouse so much, but when I do I have a wireless Logitech. Not a fan of Android, so I have an iPhone.

And what software?

I run OSX, but most of my workflow lives in the terminal. I do almost all text editing with vim, and use Grunt.js simple Makefiles for automating tasks like processing Sass and CoffeeScript.

I use a neat little tool called tmux to help me run several terminals at once. This is great for when I need to work on a couple of machines at once via SSH, or if I want to watch a compile tool like JSHint.

I use zsh instead of bash, just because it’s a little easier to use. I use both Git and Mercurial for versioning, and I also use both those tools for deploying. Very neat little tools indeed.

What would be your dream setup?

I spend a lot of time travelling, so portability is probably the most important factor. Basically if I could have an 11” MacBook Air with Mac Pro performance, I’d be happy.