Andy BaioInterview
Writer, developer, co-organiser (XOXO)
Adapted from Andy Baio's interview on Uses This, published 10 December 2019. 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
I use a mid-2014 15" MacBook Pro, one of the last great laptops Apple made - a functional keyboard, no Touch Bar, MagSafe, plenty of ports.
Thunderbolt Display+ 37 others
When I'm home, I keep it plugged into a 27" Thunderbolt Display, because my eyes are garbage.
Plugged into the display, I always keep a Lightning charger for my phone, an old wired Apple aluminum keyboard, and a classic wired Microsoft optical IntelliMouse - in my opinion, the best mouse ever made and the only one that's ever felt comfortable in my hand.
On my desk, I also have a Commodore 64 plugged into a cheap monitor along with a six-year-old gaming PC.
I keep a working Vectrex and growing collection of old adventure games on my shelf for the same reason - more like a weighted blanket of nostalgia than for any practical purpose.
Communication
(And unlike Medium, I own my work.) Anything not destined for my blog goes into the Google Suite.
I spend every day in the XOXO Slack, a private community for the thousands of people who have attended, spoken, or performed at XOXO, self-organized into hundreds of channels.
Browser
Notes
Security
Artificial Intelligence
Coding & Development
I'm not a great programmer, self-taught with Perl on the early web and no formal CS education, and it's easy for me to get overwhelmed with modern web development.
Design
Media
Storage
Other
Some people know me for my involvement with Kickstarter, which I helped get off the ground in its early days as an advisor, board member, and its first CTO.
Others may know Upcoming.org, the collaborative events calendar I started in 2003 and sold to Yahoo - which I bought back from them after they shuttered it, relaunching it and restoring the historical archives in 2017.