Jesse VincentInterview
Developer, CTO of Keyboardio
Adapted from Jesse Vincent's interview on Uses This, published 30 June 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
My primary computer these days is a late-2013 Core i5 Retina MacBook Pro with 16 gigs of ram and 500 gigs of SSD.
When I'm working at a table or desk, the laptop is perched on a Roost laptop stand.
Wireless Trackball M570+ 5 others
The Model 01 has some basic mousing functionality, but whenever I'm doing something at all mouse-intensive, I'll switch over to the Logitech Wireless Trackball.
Lately, I seem to have given up on tablets in favor of the Kindle Voyage.
AmazonBasics Universal Travel Case
The crazy TSA-safe travel setup fits in a little AmazonBasics zipcase.
At home, the soldering iron is a Weller WES51.
The only screwdriver set I find I need is the iFixIt 54 bit driver kit.
I use a fairly basic multimeter.
When pros go portable, they seem to go for TSA-antagonizing butane-powered soldering irons.) The iron's saving grace is that airport security screeners don't bat an eyelash at it.
The travel tweezers live on my keychain along with the screwdriver and knife of last resort, a Swiss+Tech Utili-Key.
A DSO Nano v3 digital oscilloscope the size of a deck of cards has recently joined the kit.
Fast Charge + Data Block USB Adaptor
Non-hardware-hacking things in the travel kit include spare MicroUSB cables, a fast-charging USB wall plug, a PortaPow USB condom, a couple SD cards and a USB stick or two.
Communication
Inside the company, we communicate using Slack pretty much exclusively.
Productivity
Corporate task tracking is in Trello, though our process is mostly built around a morning planning session where we build 'today lists' in a tiny little webapp I knocked together.
Browser
When I've run head-to-head tests, Safari has extended my battery life so much that I had a hard time believing it.
Chrome is a battery and CPU hog, but I keep coming back to it, because the feature set is as close to perfect as I've found.
Notes
I'm writing my responses to this interview in 'note', a shell script I've been using instead of Evernote for a good few years:
Security
LastPass lets me keep my passwords in sync across all of them.
Coding & Development
My personal todo list lives in a todo.txt file that I manage with todo.sh, aliased to 't'.
I jump between directories using 'z'.
A lot of my old-skool Internet life still lives in a screen session on a server.
I connect to the server with Mosh, which smooths out bad internet connections and gracefully reconnects when I change networks or put my MacBook to sleep.
Design
After running through a half-dozen EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tools over the course of a year, I settled on KiCAD, an open-source electrical CAD tool that's gaining popularity amongst folks working on open hardware.
For 'traditional' solid CAD, I've been using Autodesk Fusion 360.
Media
Storage
Dropbox keeps personal and work documents syncced to the cloud.
Other
Pomodoro keeps me on task, 25 minutes at a time.
f.lux adjusts my screen's color temperature, so I can't blame my laptop for keeping me up at night.
To that end, I went out and bought the aforementioned JetDrive and installed a recent Ubuntu + GNOME on it.