Uses

Tools I Use

(Inspired by awesome-uses)

Development Environment

  • Visual Studio Code (or Intellij, or Vim. But mostly VSCode)
    • A side note about Vim - I’m comfortable with it, but (no longer) evangelical about it. It’s an editor, it’s fast, and I now know it well enough that it stays out of my way. I’m sure if I bothered to configure nano, I’d feel the same about that.
  • Konsole
  • Zsh (+ antibody to manage plugins)
  • I currently use PopOS with the default (Gnome-derived) theme. In the past, I’ve used Fedora with i3wm and Fedora with KDE. I think PopOS is doing some pretty cool things in the Rust space, which is a good enough reason for me to use it for now.
  • jq for handling json
  • ag as a grep replacement. I briefly tried ripgrep, but for my use case (which is typically grep -F) the speed difference isn’t significant enough for me to switch
  • Terraform + ansible for managing infrastructure
    • I even use an ansible play to manage my dotfiles, for what it’s worth
  • bazel as a build tool
    • Use Maven at work, which is a Java only shop. For me, Bazel lets me build a bunch of different languages one way. It also has built-in tools to package things as debs or rpms, which is a handy way to deploy things.
  • The font Fira Code with ligatures enabled, everywhere available

Hardware

  • iPhone XR, regrettably sans case.
    • It’s a replacement for an iPhone 5s, which also didn’t have a case, and bore some impressive cracks after having been dropped one too many times.
  • Toshiba Satellite. Its one damning flaw is that it has an oldish Broadcom wifi card, whose driver is not installed by default on Fedora or Ubuntu. Even after downloading and installing the driver over Ethernet I’ve never had a good time getting it to work.

Web Apps

  • Netflix & Spotify
  • LastPass. I use the free version, and have yet to have a problem with it. Unfortunately, its security record is only so-so, so I might move away from this at some point.
  • GitHub

Running

  • Garmin Forerunner 645 music.
    • It replaces an incredibly beat-up and very old Forerunner 405, which I used until I broke the wristband beyond even the powers of copious amounts of superglue
  • Saucony Freedom ISO. I’ve gone through 4+ pairs of these, after switching away from Hoka Odysseys (which I found I was wearing through too quickly).
  • Strava. Strava has, in my opinion, better analytics even at the free level than Garmin does, and it really benefits from the community aspect of running.