Katherine Cox-BudayInterview
Writer, computer scientist
Adapted from Katherine Cox-Buday's interview on Uses This, published 3 March 2020. 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'm currently using a first generation Google Pixel.
For my next phone, I'm looking at purchasing either a Librem 5, or a PinePhone.
My personal laptop is a System76 9th generation Gazelle Pro from 2014.
For my home's infrastructure, I ran Cat 5e throughout the house which terminates into a Ubuiquiti Unifi 24 port switch.
And I have a Synology DS1819+ NAS for running some light workloads and providing on-site storage.
Communication
Productivity
I use Ansible to manage this so I can bring a new one up from scratch quickly.
Browser
I like to support browsers other than Chrome both because increasingly it seems like Google doesn't have my best-interests in mind, and because I don't want to end up where we were in the 90s with one company controlling the web.
Notes
Sitting on top of Emacs is Org mode.
Security
Coding & Development
It wouldn't make sense to start out with anything other than Emacs.
if something goes wrong, roll back to the previous state of your system); it allows for multiple versions of packages to be installed simultaneously; it can produce container images or development environments from package definitions, or even a list of packages; all of it is laid out declaratively in Guile, a lisp; and it also places a lot of emphasis on reproducible builds.
Other
I'm currently working at DigitalOcean on software that helps us manage our fleet of servers.
For the little time I have to play games, I have Windows 10 installed on an old System76 Leopard Extreme (leox3 if that means anything to you).
It sits in my homelab and runs headless so I can stream games to other machines in the house via Steam Remote Play.
I have a UniFi HD running OpenWRT for the things which move around the house.
I've pretty consistently used Ubuntu since 2005 (after much distro-hopping).
A couple of years ago, I added Guix to the mix.