Fred BenensonInterview
Data researcher (Kickstarter)
Adapted from Fred Benenson's interview on Uses This, published 14 March 2013. 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
At work I just upgraded to a 13" Retina MacBook Pro from a 15" MBP from 2010.
At home I have an iMac with a Fusion drive that I like.
I typically pair that with my Canon 50mm f/1.2 L lens, which I think is possibly one of the greatest lenses ever made, and shoot using manual focus in low light.
Coding & Development
This is a Webkit-interface for the open source data / stats language called R, and the machine it is running on in Amazon's cloud has 32GB of memory.
I recently switched to oh-my-zsh, which is a terrific "modern" shell that supports many wonderful helpers, conveniences, and themes.
My current zsh theme is "crunch" which surfaces the status of the git repo I may be in, the Ruby version I'm working with, and the current timestamp inside my shell prompt.
Other
I'm Fred Benenson, I work at Kickstarter on data.
Since a lot of my day-to-day data work begins with writing a SQL query, I use Sequel Pro extensively.