André ArkoInterview
Web developer
Adapted from André Arko's interview on Uses This, published 3 September 2021. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
Is this you? Claim this kit →Hardware
It's written in Swift, and lives on the iPhone App Store.
On trips to other countries, I add a Passport II Pro so I can use most plug types.
At any given time, work means I have between one and three 16" Intel MacBook Pros that I connect to that desk setup.
In my personal life, though, I use an M1 MacBook Air.
It's one of the few machines that can definitely outperform my tiny MacBook Air, but I pretty much only use it to play games at 144fps with all the graphics settings turned up to "highest" on my 4k LG 27GN950 monitor.
Elite Wireless Controller Series 2
The final (and my favorite) accessory is the Microsoft Elite 2 controller, the only piece of gaming hardware that feels to me like Apple could have made it.
They're all connected to an Onkyo TX-NR545 that drives 7.1 surround speakers.
Communication
My biggest timesink is definitely Twitter, where I have had an account for checks notes …14 years?
Slack is a lot more approachable than IRC, and a lot more scalable than Campfire, but has repeatedly made clear that they aren't interested in community users or moderation tools.
Productivity
Back on the personal side of things, and for once including no web development, I built a lunar calendar for witches and werewolves with my partner @sailorhg.
It's incredibly stupid, and I love the results so much I also wrote an Alfred shortcut to make it easier to screenshot and post funny examples to the Tumblr.
Everything not from an RSS feed goes into Instapaper, where I like to think I might, one day, read things.
I calendar from Fantastical, due to the combination of natural language event creation and continuous new helpful features for years.
For calculations, I'm a long-time user of Soulver, which hits the perfect sweet spot between calculator and spreadsheet for me.
To keep track of my own projects and todos, I've been using OmniFocus for more than a decade.
Browser
Dash, to download and search API docs incredibly quickly
Notes
When I'm working with others, I'm a big fan of Draft for the editing experience that includes versioned diffs.
For anything with dated entries, like a work log, journal, or reading and watching diary, I'm a big fan of Day One, thanks to the date-oriented entries and sync across all my devices.
For more general "keep things in it", I've been using Notion.
Security
Oof.) I also use Little Snitch, so that I can control what programs are allowed to use the network depending on what network I'm connected to.
Coding & Development
I've loved the Ruby programming language ever since I discovered it in 2003.
Then I discovered Ruby on Rails in 2004 or so, and that led to lots of involvement in the Ruby community.
A laptop with 32GB of RAM is a godsend when you have to run a bunch of stuff in Docker.
To make that easier, I've scripted a lot of the setup in my dotfiles, which use homebrew extensively to install applications and command-line tools.
Design
Media
SoundSource, a replacement for the Sound menu that has superpowers, including per app volume controls and a menu for changing outputs
Storage
Other
getting involved in open source in 2009 and ending up lead developer of Bundler, the Ruby language dependency manager
My programming work is mostly web development on macOS.