Erin McKeanInterview
Founder of Wordnik
Adapted from Erin McKean's interview on Uses This, published 9 April 2015. 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 keep it on a Rain Design Mac stand when I'm in my home office, connected to an ancient Dell monitor.
I rotate between a couple of different equally unsatisfying ergo keyboards and a plain ol' Apple wireless, and I use a Logitech ergo mouse with a scroll wheel and lots of buttons (but I don't really use the extra buttons).
I still miss my awesome Palm Pre.
For sewing, I have a Juki HZL-E80 machine -- not expensive, a real workhorse.
Sarasa Clip Gel Retractable+ 2 others
I like Zebra Sarasa pens (.7) or, if I need something to make me write slowly, disposable Varsity fountain pens.
I mostly read on an iPad mini these days.
Communication
(Friends don't let friends manage their own WordPress installations.)
For email I use Thunderbird because I like to have my email near me, where I can keep an eye on it, instead of up in the cloud.
Productivity
(Once the manuscript is back from the editor, though, Word track-changes is forced upon one.)
Notes
Coding & Development
I have just switched to zsh, and am kicking myself for not doing it earlier.
For writing, I use the Scrivener app for my drafts, separate notebooks for each project (the medium-sized Muji ones are nice), and index cards.
Media
Storage
I use Google Drive for anything that needs collaboration, aside from book manuscripts.
I keep non-Kindle ebooks in Dropbox and sync them to BlueFire, very convenient!
Other
I'm Erin and I run Wordnik.com, the world's biggest English dictionary (by number of entries).
Years ago I used fancy custom SGML-based dictionary editing software that was written in Denmark and ran on OS/2, but now I just use text editors.
The Wordnik front end is in Node.js, so I'm spending a lot of time with Node these days.
I even wrote a little npm module, umpteen that's overdue for an update.
I use WPEngine for the Wordnik blog and my blog -- also A+ support.