On Zack’s indirect suggestion, I’ve decided to do a clean install of Yosemite. As I wait for Yosemite to download, I thought I’d do an itemization of the software I’m using these days. The last time I did this was January 2011 — fun to see how some things change and others remain the same.
Writing code and leading development teams is my full-time job. For local development, I use Vagrant and Salty WordPress. I was using VMWare Fusion for a while, but the filesystem caching issues drove me back to Virtualbox. I edit files with Sublime Text 3 running the Colbalt 2 theme. iTerm 2 (full-screen mode, duh) tames my terminal windows. Only on a rare occasion do I have to open Cyberduck to SFTP somewhere.
On the command line, my life is complete with ZSH, autojump, Git, hub, and WP-CLI. I consider every day I don’t have to use Subversion to be a good day. Most projects I’m on use Github with a as-simple-as-possible feature branch pull-request workflow.
Bartender wrangles my menu bar into submission. If I didn’t have it, my menu bar would be overrun with icons for:
- 1Password – The only sane way to use passwords these days.
- Quickcast – Shareable screencasts in just a few minutes.
- Glui – Annotated screengrabs. Far superior to Skitch.
- Alfred – Maybe obsoleted by Yosemite.
- RescueTime – Keeps track of which applications I’m using. I mostly use it for the weekly email summaries.
- Sidestep – Securely your internet traffic over any SSL connection.
- Flux – For the rare occasion I have the computer on past 7 pm.
- Clocks – Menu bar clock replacement for those who always be coordinating in multiple timezones.
- Caffeine – Jiggles your mouse when you need your screen to stay awake. Useful when giving presentations, etc.
- Crashplan – Affordable service for keeping everything backed up in the cloud.
Skype and Slack are open everyday. I’d like to say Slack is over-hyped, but they’ve done a really nice job. Sometimes I remember to open Linkinus to idle in various open source project IRC rooms.
How I run my business is really a post in itself. Harvest is indispensable — I use it for sending estimates, time tracking, and billing. Things is awesome for keeping track of what needs to be done and when. A long time Remember The Milk user, I love having a dedicated desktop application for task management. Mailplane is the best way to deal with email in 2014.
Oh, last but not least, I use a mid-2011 13 inch Macbook Air with a 256 GB SSD and 4 GB of RAM. It’s the best computer I’ve ever owned.
