Lara HoganInterview
Front-end developer, performance engineering manager (Etsy)
Adapted from Lara Hogan's interview on Uses This, published 2 September 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 ↗
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At work I use a 13" MacBook Air with a secondary 24" Samsung monitor, Bluetooth mouse and USB keyboard.
When I'm at my desk and have time to focus, I'll use Audio-Technica ATH-M50S headphones.
On my commute each morning I'll just use little earclip headphones, though.
I rest my iPhone 5c on a handmade wooden stand during the day.
At home, I use an often-shut 11" MacBook Air with a Dell UltraSharp 20" LCD Display as my primary display.
AmazonBasics 4-inch Lightning Cable
I almost exclusively use short USB cables at home to minimize clutter, like this 4-inch lightning to USB cable.
They're plugged into this 10 port hub, which I love because of the two flexible ports.
Super Sticky Full Adhesive Notes
I use Full Adhesive Post-Its to measure the progress of the book so I can celebrate each 10% of pages done and each new chapter done with a donut (blue Post-It is % of pages written, yellow indicates chapters written).
I also use Aqua Notes in the shower to keep track of any book ideas I have in there.
My other favorite shower hack is this EcoExtreme Waterproof Portable Speaker Case, so I can listen to music or podcasts from my phone and feel even more productive.
Speaking of productivity at home, the Mint Plus Automatic Floor Cleaner is awesome.
When I'm presenting, I use a Logitech Wireless Presenter Remote thanks to a recommendation from Greg Hoy.
I'll also keep an Anker portable charger handy.
I use a Crabby Wallet when I'm traveling for work to hold my business cards, hotel key card, etc.; it's nice and flexible and wraps around my phone neatly.
I'll keep a backup copy of my presentation and any fonts used on a little, low-profile USB drive.
MagSafe to MagSafe 2 Converter
Because my home laptop is an older Air, and my work laptop is a newer one, I travel with a few MagSafe to MagSafe2 converters so I don't have to worry about which power supply I have on hand.
When I'm traveling, I'll use it in addition to Herschel's Little America Backpack, which has been the perfect packing size for every trip I've made this year.
At work we use a Modlet in the physical device testing lab, which we use to measure energy consumption over time and find ways to optimize it.
Communication
I use LimeChat at work as my IRC client.
Skype comes in handy for chatting with my editor and catching up with mobile/performance friends who are doing awesome, innovative work that our team can learn from.
I also used Google Hangouts a bunch to coordinate with Paul Lewis as we created our presentation for Google I/O this year.
After the presentation is done I'll check Twitter Analytics to see what resonated the most with people.
Productivity
When it comes to presenting, I live in Keynote.
Browser
Notes
Security
Coding & Development
At Etsy I've managed the mobile web engineering team, and now manage the performance engineering team.
To more easily track time with RescueTime, I use Sublime Text exclusively for book writing and use Coda for edits to my personal website.
I also constantly have TextEdit open on both laptops for eliminating formatting when copying/pasting.
Chrome DevTools is always open when I'm coding.
Design
For creating and editing other kinds of images for the book I'm in Photoshop.
Media
ImageOptim stays in my dock on both laptops, too.
Storage
Other
O'Reilly has a pretty sweet setup that takes the chapters in Asciidoc format and outputs them in both HTML and PDF versions so I can see how they'll render in the online and print versions of the book.
For diagrams in the book I'm trying out Gliffy.
We run a bunch of automated performance dashboards using WebPagetest internally.
One more open source shoutout to the RFID device checkout system built by our office hackers for our device lab.
When I'm getting close to giving the talk, I'll update the slides on SpeakerDeck, get ready to auto-tweet from the deck using Keynote Tweet, and build a custom URL on my personal website to house the slides and links to resources which I switch to bit.ly links so I can track clicks.