My Setup and Software

I too read Al3x's interview the other day, and like John Nunemaker, figured I'd share my setup, as I enjoy reading what others use and often can pick up a few interesting tools or tidbits.

Unlike Mr. Nunemaker, my desk is too messy, IMHO, to photograph right now :) However, many similarities aside from that. On with it...

I use a 17" MacBook Pro with 4GB RAM as my only machine these days. Like Alex and John, I really like having just a single machine, and I no longer work for a corporation where I'd worry about that. DealBase is cool and wouldn't try to make some wacko claim to some work not relevant (and we've explicitly discussed my use of a single machine, etc.). I have my MBP open on a laptop arm from Ergotron, and then my primary monitor is a 30" Dell. Really love the big monitor. I do my main work o the 30", and then the laptop screen has TweetDeck, iChat, Things, some Fluid apps, and other things that I tend to more glance at, and aren't primary work items.

Further, I use a wireless Apple keyboard, and like John, I just love this thing. I can't tell you how long I'd been looking for a keyboard that was just a keyboard (but with arrow keys). I hate normal keyboards that take up so much extra space on the right side (my mouse side) with stuff I rarely use - which only exacerbates problems with having my arm/elbow canitlevered further out to use the mouse, sometimes causing arm strain after long days of coding. I use Logitech MX Revolution cordless mouse, which I like quite a lot.

Transitioning to music... I use JBL Creature speakers, and listen to a variety of things, or nothing. Pandora, via a Fluid app, iTunes (my own playlists, or various Ambient "radio" stations), etc. Either that, or we have a whole-house NuVo Concerto audio system, so sometimes I have that on either with XM satellite radio, or to a playlist from the iPod we have hooked into it. The NuVo setup is nice because it fills my office with sound a bit better (via in-ceiling speakers), but I have more variety via the computer.

As with Alex and John, I am absolutely in love with my iPhone 3G. It is even better than expected. It has essentially replaced my 80GB iPod in the car, typically because it's more up to date, and I like it's UI better; I can remotely work on servers if I have to via iSSH, play games if I'm bored, use InstaPaper to read things I've set for reading later, sync with Address Book and iCal, and of course Twitter, via Tweetie. So, yes, I use Apple's Address Book and iCal, for great sync, simplicity, etc.

Ok, onto dev stuff. My primary work is on Rails-based web-apps, although I dabble with other things as well. DealBase is my day job, and I'm also involved with Bring Light.

Yet again, like Alex and John, I spend the bulk of my time in TextMate, iTerm (a better Terminal, IMHO), and Safari. And actually, I do my development testing in nightly builds of WebKit/Safari, and all my other browsing in standard Safari. I do pull up Firefox for testing, and to use YSlow and sometimes Firebug (although I've been finding the dev tools in WebKit nightlies work well). I've used Emacs - did so for about a year when working with Linux as my desktop. I ditched it back then in favor of Visual SlickEdit, but these days TextMate just rules. I don't get the Emacs passion - why do you want to press two keys for everything, especially the most common things? Yes, I know, you can setup different bindings, etc., but come on the most basic things like saving, opening, copy, paste, etc. should be "single" key (and by single I mean some meta+key) strokes by default. I do fire up vi all the time at the command line on remote servers, and even occasionally on my MBP for some real quick edit. Also, I spend the bulk of my day in my text editor, so yes, appearance matters, and TextMate kills others. I've also used a lot of IDE's in the past, from IDEA, to Eclipse, to Visual Studio. Visual Studio is actually quite good if you have to suffer in that world, but I find Eclipse just plain crappy. IDEA was great for Java, and their Ruby setup will be something to keep an eye on, but generally, the setup I have now works well.

I have all my code for nearly everything I do (e.g. both private and open source/public) on GitHub, and truly love it. Git has been a huge win, and gives me the best of, as well as improving SVN and Perforce. I'm using GitX for most of my commits and history browsing these days.

I use RSpactor for continuously running our RSpec suite, and we also use RSpec stories (but haven't converted to Cucumber yet). I recently added speech output to RSpactor, and that is my preferred notification instead of Growl. We use Pivotal Tracker for tasks/stories/features as well as bug tracking. We used to use Lighthouse, but having it all in one place was nicer, and Tracker wins big time in my opinion. If you want GitHub post-receive hook for Tracker, I recently whipped that up, and its been a real nice addition. We too use Hoptoad for exception notification, and really like it. Also, New Relic is in use at DealBase. I also like viewing Google Analytics with Analytics Reporting Suite, a slick AIR app.

I really like Navicat as a GUI for database stuff. It's proprietary/pay software, but honestly, it's worth it to me. I can do all this stuff command line fine, but the GUI simply makes it a heck of a lot faster to view the results, quickly re-sort on a column, mess around with queries, etc. Also, it has great SSH support, so I can tunnel into all my server's DB's with ease.

I have CruiseControl.rb setups for all my Rails apps, and make use of CCMenu for a nice little status menu item showing me what's going on with those.

I pretty much can't live without LaunchBar. Same goes for 1Password.

Skitch is quite handy for showing sharing and annotating screen shots, and we use Google Docs and Gmail. Speaking of email, I am a huge fan of Mailplane, which is a Mac app for Gmail. Integration is superb, and I can quickly switch around my 15 or so Gmail accounts with ease. I find it superior to a Fluid app for Gmail, since the integration is better and it handles multiple accounts.

I host most of my own web apps on Slicehost, and DealBase is at EngineYard.

I also use Backpack some, although not nearly as much as I used to, and access it about 99% of the time via Packrat. MarsEdit is my blog authoring tool of choice. NetNewsWire is my RSS reader.

All of my photography and photo processing, etc. are done in Adobe Lightroom. I use the Flickr plugin for it as well.

Various other bits:

• TextPander


• WeatherDock


• Pukka


• Flickr


• Del.icio.us


• xScope - a great screen ruler app


• Photoshop CS3 (look for my name in the about box too :)


• JungleDisk - I do some backups with this


• SuperDuper! Still my favorite backup, although I use TimeMachine too


• CSS Edit and XyleScope sometimes


• Last.fm - is running all the time, but I really don't actually make use of it, kinda silly.


• Acrobat Pro and Reader


• XCode (or TextMate) if I'm working on an Objective-C/Cocoa app.


• iStat menus


• YouControl Tunes

p.s. One other bit I can't live without but really isn't computing hardware/software, is my espresso setup. I use an Expobar Brewtus II machine, Macap MC4 stepless doserless grinder and a variety of cups (mostly Nuova Pointe and Illy). I use only totally fresh beans from a variety of places (favorites include Blue Bottle, Ecco Caffe, PT's, 49th Parallel (unfortunately not often, since shipping from Canada makes it a bit cost prohibitive), etc.). Coffelab tamper and Bumper stand and knock box. My espresso bar is kept clean (unlike my desk). The pictures are a bit older, so don't show bottomless portafilter in use these days.

Whew, that's more than plenty. What's your setup?