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.
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.
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 🤷.
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.
This keeps me sounding radio-ready … you know, just in case.
The 🐐. This dock connects my mac to all of the above peripherals, plus my Focusrite 2i2 and Axe FX II for weekend guitar fun.
PHPStorm is used for most development. You can’t beat its powerful refactoring, class name completion, and code navigation for larger projects.
For smaller projects, VS Code is my go-to. I primarily use VS Code for Laravel or React development.
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.
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.
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 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.
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)
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.
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 is a window manager for Mac. I have hotkeys configured to quickly split two windows, make my editor full screen, etc.
Bartender is used to keep my Mac’s toolbar tidy.
1Password is my password manager of choice.
Sip is used to eyedrop colors from webpages, desktop applications, etc.
I use Spotify to listen to music and maintain my sanity while working.