Russ CoxInterview
Software developer (Plan 9, RE2, Go)
Adapted from Russ Cox's interview on Uses This, published 9 April 2011. 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 used an IBM Thinkpad X40 running Linux from 2004 until very recently.
I bought a Kindle 3 recently, and I like it, but it hasn't stood the test of time yet.
I'm excited about being able to run Android apps like SmugFolio on my Google TV box.
Communication
Productivity
Browser
Coding & Development
For the last two and a half years I've been one of the core developers of the Go programming language.
I run acme full screen as my day to day work environment.
Rob Pike's sam editor deserves special mention too.
From a UI standpoint, it's a graphical version of ed, which you either love or hate, but it does two things better than any other editor I know.
The original target environment was 1200 bps modem lines in the early 1980s, so it's a little surprising how relevant the design remains, but in fact, it's the same basic design used by any significant JavaScript application on the web today.
Media
Storage
I use Unison to sync files between my various computers.
Dropbox seems to be the hot new thing, but I like that Unison doesn't ever store my files on someone else's computers.
Other
For about a decade I worked on the operating system Plan 9 from Bell Labs.
I now work at Google, where I created Google Code Search and along with it the RE2 regular expression library.
Plan 9 from User Space+ 2 others
The result is called Plan 9 from User Space and is probably much more widely used today than Plan 9 ever was.