Dana ContrerasInterview
Systems engineer (Twitter), pilot
Adapted from Dana Contreras's interview on Uses This, published 14 September 2012. 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
My official Twitter gear is a 2.7 GHz 13" MacBook Pro with 8 GB RAM and a 500 GB SSD.
My monitor rests atop a (now nonfunctional) NeXTstation Turbo, just for the nostalgia.
I use a stock Apple extended keyboard and some random Logitech mouse that they threw at me when I got here.
Right now I've got two pairs of Sony MDR-EX10LP earbuds that I bought at an airport one day when I forgot to pack my Apple earbuds.
As for handhelds, I carry an iPhone 4S with a kick-ass etched steel backplate.
My e-reader is a first-gen nook that I love dearly for its simplicity.
I own an iPad 2 but I never use it.
When I fly, I use a Lightspeed Thirty 3G headset with 20dB passive and 30dB active noise cancellation and a pair of Ray-Ban aviators.
(I like to joke that I'm the only person in San Francisco who wears Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses and actually is an aviator.) Lately I've been flying a Cessna 162, which is comically small for a commercial pilot, but it's a fun little airplane with a really nice glass-panel cockpit that has all the goodies like GPS, moving map, terrain/altitude alerts, and so on.
Communication
Which entails Scala 2.9 and Kiji, Twitter's customized version of REE 1.8.7.
Browser
Chrome for browsing because it really is the fastest, best browser out there.
Still, I'll always have a special place in my heart for OmniWeb.
Security
I'm going to start with 1Password because it seriously saves my ass.
Coding & Development
BBEdit is my primary text editor, and has been for years.
(I'm even on their testimonials page.) At Twitter I use it for all of my Scala and Ruby projects; I wrote a language plugin for Scala that works really well for my purposes.
When I need a terminal-based editor, I use Emacs, like god intended.
Terminal of course, for compiling, testing, and debugging Scala; running Twitter in dev mode; and responding to Twitter incidents.
Media
On my iPhone, I've been enjoying Path.
Other
f.lux adjusts my screen's color temperature after sunset to match the color of the room lighting.
I keep track of books I've read and want to read on Goodreads.