Uses

This is a list of all the things that I use to be productive day-to-day. It’s inspired by this page.

Hardware

2019 MacBook Pro 16"

I replaced my old Windows/Linux custom-built PC with this on July 22nd, 2020. Since then, it’s been amazing. Though I had to give up some gaming capability, the tradeoff is that everything else is worlds better. Having 32 GB of RAM certainly helps matters.

Steelseries Apex Pro Keyboard

Website: Steelseries Apex Pro

This keyboard has a beautiful aesthetic, sturdy construction, and a typefeel that I just adore. It’s great for gaming and typing.

Viotek GN34C 34" Ultrawidescreen Monitor

Website: Viotek GN34C

Though some games don’t support 3440x1440 resolution, I’ve found this to be excellent for coding and for graphics editing capabilities. Also, watching movies on this thing is awesome. In order for it to work correctly on my MacBook Pro, though, I needed to buy an app. It doesn’t properly declare its resolutions.

DXRacer King Zero gaming chair

Website: DXRacer King Zero

After many years of living with a barely-intact office chair I bought for $5 at Goodwill, I bought a DXRacer King Zero gaming chair. It was a night and day experience. So comfortable! Mine is sunburst yellow and black.

Lifestyle Software

Firefox

Website: Firefox

This is my web browser of choice. I avoid Chromium-based browsers whenever possible. Sometimes I’ll use Safari, though.

Design Software

Affinity Photo

Website: Affinity Photo

My replacement for Photoshop. It’s pretty good, and while my Photoshop muscle memory doesn’t translate perfectly, its buy-once model combined with its feature set makes it the better alternative.

Affinity Designer

Website: Affinity Designer

Same story as Photo, but this one replaces Adobe Illustrator. The one difference is that I reach for Inkscape when I need to trace raster graphics.

Affinity Publisher

Website: Affinity Publisher

Same story as Photo, but this one replaces Adobe InDesign. It’s still new enough to have some issues and there are features missing, but it works well enough for laying out books and such.

Development Software

Visual Studio Code

Website: Microsoft Visual Studio Code

Though I switched back to Sublime Text for a time due to its speed, I had to come back to VSCode for light code editing owing to its robust plugin ecosystem.

GoLand

Website: Jetbrains GoLand

I write a lot of Go. And by far the best tool for writing Go has been GoLand.

PHPStorm

Website: Jetbrains PHPStorm

When I write PHP, this is the IDE I use most.

Hosting and Infrastructure Services

Namecheap

Website: Namecheap

I’ve heard that other domain registrars are better (e.g., Hover), but I host almost all of my domains at Namecheap because it works well enough.

Digital Ocean

Website: Digital Ocean

Digital Ocean is the infrastructure provider I use for all of my personal projects. It’s cheaper than AWS, Azure, or GCP, the tooling is really good, and the community is fantastic.

Netlify

Website: Netlify

Netlify hosts this website, and a handful of other static sites. It’s free and works really well.