Seems that a lot of developers are creating these /uses pages after discovering Wes Bos’s /uses page.

My favorite of these happens to be from Jon Suh. His /uses page includes a photo, which is what I did here.

While I was interning, I had enough money to make my desk setup look sick as Wes and Scott would say. So some of the stuff below will change.

These items use affiliate links. You can buy from them, or not. Whatever works best for you.

Gear

Let’s start with my gear.

Next Gen Gear

Software

  • VS Code
    • It does everything I need it to do. Atom was nice and had a lot of features but goddamn it’s hella slow. So I went back to VS Code 2 and couldn’t be happier.
  • Oh My Zsh
    • I will never use a terminal without this installed.
  • Sketch for UI design
  • Boom 3D
    • This makes everything sound amazing.
  • Xcode
  • Chrome
  • PopClip
    • Using PopClip is a lifesaver. When it doesn’t work I am lost.
  • Alfred
    • Workflows make this my favorite app. I can’t live without it. You can find my workflows here. I have way too many, I admit.
  • Text Expander
  • Lightroom CC
    • For basic edits. Yeah, I bit on the Adobe train but only the photography bundle with 1TB of storage.
  • Lightroom Classic CC
    • For all my editing needs. It is what I started using years ago. Muscle memory, and all that.
  • Amphetamine to keep my Mac awake
  • Shell Runner
    • To test shell scripts
  • BetterSnapTool is my choice for window snapping.
  • Quiver is a programmers notebook to take notes with syntax highlighting and markdown support. Supports many languages 3.
  • Tweetbot 2
    • The 3rd iteration hogs CPU and memory. If it was more efficient I’d use it; the ability to add gifs right in the app is killer. But it freezes constantly. So I use v2.
  • Franz. This is a chat aggregator. Open source and wayyyyyy better looking than Rambox.
  • Things 3 for tasks.4
  • Notion for Project management.5
  • Evernote
    • Nothing beats it for note-taking and archiving.
  • Fantastical 2 for scheduling
  • Dash 4. 6
  • Sip for Mac for a color picker
  • ScreenFlow
    • As I get into making egghead lessons and more screencasts for That Mac Nerd, I need a heavy duty piece of software to do so. Screenflow fits the bill.
  • Open Broadcaster Software
    • Going to stream at Twitch soon enough. This is the gold standard but their Mac app is terribly behind the Windows app.
  • Private Internet Access VPN
    • Should always have a VPN.
  • CloudApp
    • This is how I share bugs and other things with devs and dev teams. Also an easy way to make a gif of a feature or bug on my Mac.
  • Setapp
    • It finally has enough utilities to make it worth the subscription price for me.

I Use a lot of software, I admit

But I use ALL OF IT.

So this is my setup and what I am currently using. You can show me your dev setup on Twitter.

  1. Got the gold and this will be my last iPhone for a while. No need to upgrade yearly as these phones are more than capable of lasting a couple years. ↩

  2. I did have Ulysses installed. They even featured me on their blog. I mainly used it to post to WordPress and since I am on Gatsby and Jekyll for everything now I don’t need the subscription. I feel really bad. But now I use VSCode for this and a couple scripts to post here and my other blogs. ↩

  3. Even brainfuck! ↩

  4. This is the only task manager that I actually look at and use. It is that beautiful, simple, and it has impressed me far more than any task manager in recent memory. ↩

  5. This is such a deep app and I am in love with it. After avoiding it because I was a heavy user of Evernote and quite liked it, there were things that annoyed me about it. Everyone talked about this app, Notion and I signed up. Been using it for two weeks and I have paid the subscription. It’s that good. Still setting it up but here’s my dashboard. ↩

  6. Offline docs ftw! Plus much more. ↩