Eric MillInterview
Web developer (18F)
Adapted from Eric Mill's interview on Uses This, published 28 August 2014. 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
For the last couple years, I've used a Thinkpad W520 laptop as my main companion.
It is the farthest cry from a MacBook Air.
For a phone, I use a Nexus 5.
Coding & Development
For a text editor, I use Sublime Text 3, which is the only piece of software I've paid for on my laptop.
Other
Amazon Web Services+ 16 others
After years of almost exclusively shared hosting, I now host most of my work on Amazon Web Services.
I think there's a lot of lunch to be eaten from Amazon by competitors who offer a simple, secure experience and project a competitive, underdog image (and I've been messing with DigitalOcean, who I think is demonstrating this).
I'm an all-Ubuntu kind of guy, at work and at home.
And I think Canonical has learned a couple lessons about the extent of their might - they finally made Amazon integration opt-in, and they left their own system process manager behind to align with the Debian community's decision.
My Thinkpad does keep a Windows partition around for the occasional Win- or Mac-only game, but Steam's surge of Linux support and Humble Bundle's years of insistence on Linux support has made Linux support so likely for new games that I could probably ditch this now.