Uses

This page is dedicated to the tools that I use in web development. Wes Bos setup a awesome site at uses.tech that lists out other web developers pages.

Hardware

Like most people I spend most of my days at my desk. My desk setup is:

  • Autonomous Standing Desk
  • Two LG 27inch Ultrafine 4k monitors.
  • Custom built pc with an AMD Ryzen 5950X 32 core CPU, 64GB of RAM, AMD RX 580 graphics card and PCI gen 4 drives. 
  • Mackie CR4BT speakers with a Yamaha 8 inch sub
  • Focusrite Scarlet usb-c audio interface
  • Steelseries Apex Pro keybaord
  • Logitech G603 cordless gaming mouse

My desktop is setup to dual boot Linux and Windows 10. I love to switch up my OS when things get a little stale. Windows has come a long way in the development world with WSL 2 and Docker. 

Linux is my daily driver and operating system of choice for web development. I have been loving Fedora Workstation 34 for the few months. Everything works perfectly out of the box and it has more updated packages than some of the other distros. Stability is key for a work machine.

My laptop is a work supplied 16 inch Macbook Pro. The keyboard is finally better and overall it is a solid machine. It reminds me of the original 15 inch retina since it is a little thicker than butterfly keyboard 15 inchers. The battery life is still pretty weak and only lasts a couple of hours.

The main issue with Mac OS and PHP development is how the Docker Desktop bind mounts work. Most of the time I use my linux desktop pc as a development server with VS Code’s remote ssh plugin. That approach can make the battery last almost a full afternoon of patio coding. OS X also works great with a Linux virtual machine in lew of Docker Desktop for PHP stacks.

Software

My main development platforms are Javascript, Java (Adobe AEM) and PHP. Here are the tools that I use:

  • Microsoft VS Code
  • vim
  • ZSH (oh my zsh and powerlevel 10k theme)
  • Docker
  • DDEV for Drupal and WordPress
  • Firefox and 1password
  • git cli

VS Code is an awesome editor! Some of the plugin’s like remote ssh have been a game changer. I have not needed to reach for an IDE thankfully for a long time now. I also love using vim.