🛠 Uses

I always find it fascincating to see how people work. I’ll eventually even put out a post on my notion dashboard. Moreover, because this page is checked in to git, I’d love to track how I do my work over the years.

/uses is a faux-standard where div-slingers and keyboard-cowboys alike write about how they drive their output. There’s uses.tech to track more of these - if you also find this stuff interesting.

As with everybody who has access to electricity, my workflow relies on hardware and software. The software can more or less be split in to 2 categories: CLI and Electron.

🧙 Software

In terms of OS, it doesn’t matter (as long as it’s not Windows). I’ve not used that thing since Windows 7. For personal use, I’m sat on Kubuntu 21.04 and for work, I use the latest MacOS. This doesn’t really make much of a difference, because I’m either in a ZSH session or in Firefox.

Everything I need to code lives in a terminal. I use zsh with oh-my-zsh and a few plugins. my $PS1 is juanghurtado. My workflow sits me in Tmux: Editor on the left and a small pane for a few stacked terminals.

On Kubuntu, I use Konsole; it’s pretty good and I’ve got no complaints. On MacOS I use iTerm. I’m not a power user, but I’d like to be.

I used to be a huge fan of VS Code, but I rediscovered Vim (Neovim) from my IRC days. It’s pretty excellent - especially with a few plugins. If you don’t already, I recommend remapping Caps Lock to Escape.

The plugins that get my work done are:

• vim-plug: Make it work
• NERDTree: Let me see my files
• coc: Eslint and highlighting
• airline: Give me some info

Pretty basic - but I used to distro-hop a lot and this is my minmax of low-maintenance and usefulness. I’ve also got plugins for the various web frameworks that I practice. Those vary, though.

That’s pretty much my stack. I use Firefox for dev (but Chrom* for anything PWA related) and Postman for API calls.

🌍 Webapps

Without any mind-tooling, I’d be horribly organised. I use Notion to drive pretty-much every aspect of my life. I’ve split this in to Projects, a huge kanboard and a daily tracker. I’ll write more about this in the future - I promise.

I also live in the MDN docs, these are incredible. My code lives on github. I read a lot of Hacker News, CSS Tricks and I’m on Mastodon (@hjfitz@fosstodon).

🤖 Hardware

Hardware drives the developer - but really, you just need a good, sturdy laptop. I’ve had this Thinkpad X1 for about 7 years now. It’s pre-owned, almost 10 years old, and cost me £350. It’s got an i7 and 8gb memory. It’s plenty fast. Storage doesn’t matter to me: Everything lives online - photos, code, music. For anything extra, I’ve got a NAS.

I wouldn’t swap this laptop for anything. The keyboard is smooth - but after all of the use, I’ve had to wrap the wrist rest in duct tape; I was getting the odd electric shock from it. Not ideal.

For work, I get some nice toys which, knowing my employer, is a shock. I’ve got an older Macbook Pro (with the touchbar) with an i7 and 16gb memory. It sometimes feels slower than the X1. I’ve got a Filco Majestouch 2 and Steelseries Sensei - but they’re mine. I’ve also got a couple of Dell U2719D courtesy of work.