Workstation

  • 13-inch Space Gray MacBook Pro

    I’ve been a Mac person since going through the design program at Auburn, and the experience only gets better. They make great products. Pricy, yes, but the experience is solid all-around … from design to development, my only complaints are Docker.

  • Dell Ultrasharp U2417H 24 inch monitor × 2

    I’ve thought about upgrading to an ultrawide monitor several times over the years, but honestly? I’m 100% happy with these monitors. They each have enough real estate that I can multitask successfully, and they didn’t break the bank.

  • AmazonBasics Dual Monitor Stand

    Much cheaper than the name brand dual monitor stands. They only pivot side-to-side or forward and backward, but it’s at eye level for me 🤷.

  • Kanto YU2 Powered Desktop Speakers

    I’ve got a smaller desktop, so I need every inch of space I can eek out of it. The Kanto YU2 speakers fit the bill nicely—they’ve got a footprint of around 4 inches × 6 inches, and they sound good enough for Google Meet calls.

  • Shure MV7 microphone

    This keeps me sounding radio-ready … you know, just in case.

  • CalDigit TS4 Plus Thunderbolt 3 Dock

    The 🐐. This dock connects my mac to all of the above peripherals, plus my Focusrite 2i2 and Axe FX II for weekend guitar fun.

Development

  • PHPStorm

    PHPStorm is used for most development. You can’t beat its powerful refactoring, class name completion, and code navigation for larger projects.

  • VS Code

    For smaller projects, VS Code is my go-to. I primarily use VS Code for Laravel or React development.

  • TablePlus

    TablePlus is a great database GUI. I picked it up initially because it was the only Mac database manager that could handle MS SQL, which I need at work sometimes. It quickly became my favorite database tool, however.

  • Laravel Valet

    You can’t beat Laravel Valet for quickly getting a development environment up to speed. It configures my mac to run Nginx in the background, and uses DnsMasq to proxy all requests to a “pretty” local URL.

  • Docker

    I use Docker to manage my database, Elasticsearch, Mailhog, Redis and RabbitMQ instances. I use Tighten’s Takeout CLI tool to spin up these Docker containers.

  • Postman

    Postman is great for building out or testing out APIs. We use a team account at work to share requests to get developers up to speed on 3rd-party services quickly.

  • iTerm

    I use iTerm as my terminal. I’m not an iTerm power user by any means, but I like the fact that it has true color support; I like for all of my applications to have the same theme (Palenight, as of this writing)

Design

  • Figma

    Hopefully Adobe doesn’t SaaS-ify this app; it’s been such a breath of fresh air in the land of user experience design tools.

Productivity

  • CleanShot X

    CleanShot X is a screenshot program that takes the place of the default Mac screenshot program. It makes screenshots a little nicer; adding a Mac-centric background around windows that are being screenshot, and allows editing the screenshot after snapping a pic.

  • Spectacle

    Spectacle is a window manager for Mac. I have hotkeys configured to quickly split two windows, make my editor full screen, etc.

  • Bartender

    Bartender is used to keep my Mac’s toolbar tidy.

  • 1Password

    1Password is my password manager of choice.

  • Sip

    Sip is used to eyedrop colors from webpages, desktop applications, etc.

  • Spotify

    I use Spotify to listen to music and maintain my sanity while working.