Things I recommend to get the job done.

Over the years, I've collected some clutter that makes my life more enjoyable. Here's some of my favorites.

Workstation

  • Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 2 (2019)

    My first professional grade laptop was a 2012 MacBook Pro my dad bought me for college. I used it all the way until 2019, upgrading the internals along the way when things got to slow.

    In 2019, an interviewer mentioned my laptop was a bit slower than other laptops around the office. I decided to upgrade to make my interviewing experience a bit better and got myself a Lenovo. I tripped over the power cord that December and bent the plug, and that is when I decided to keep it.

    I like this laptop for the upgradeability - I buy RAM and disk separately to get the best price and upgrade on my own timeline. Since I use Linux, I'm hoping this is the last laptop I really need to upgrade to. If Ubuntu gets too slow, I'll change the distro to something like Arch.

  • 2x Dell U2717D Monitors (2018)

    Linux resolution scaling can be a nightmare. I purchased my laptop with the smallest resolution possible (1440p instead of 4K). For monitors, I was worried that Linux drivers for ultrawide monitors would not be supported, so opted for a more traditional setup of two monitors. More screen space as a developer = higher productivity.

  • Herman Miller Aeron Chair (with Lumbar Support)

    Herman Miller chairs come new at $2000. I buy my Herman Miller chairs for around $400 on Craigslist. I bought one for work and one for home. I dropped the second one down some steps in D.C. and it still works fine.

Development tools

  • Visual Studio Code

    This editor is so good, it made some Microsoft haters come out of their shell. Look through the extensions marketplace for popular extensions, it turns a simple text editor into an IDE beast.

  • tmux

    I used to use iTerm2 but there is no equal on Linux. So I use tmux - combined with tmux-resurrect, I can create the perfect terminal layout for me, take it to any operating system, and save my setup to disk to boot up whenever I restart my laptop.

  • OBS Studio

    An open-source version of Loom. Pretty much has all features Loom has, a bit clunkier to use with worse audio, but totally free.

Productivity

  • ChatGPT

    It's pretty much my unpaid intern that I don't feel bad about underpaying.

  • Hourly Journal

    I built out my own software to record an hourly journal, where I actually record my day in 15-minute increments. It's helped me stay focused during long stretches of personal time.