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Following up on my post yesterday, here is a brief audit of the digital tools I use daily. This list changes as time passes, so this is what I’m using this month. Maybe I’ll update next month with a different set of tools. Obsidian is my text organizer. I use it for everything from to-do lists to notes and thoughts, and even this blog post starts here. I can go on for days about why I prefer Obsidian, but that is better served by a later post. Visual Studio Code - I want to say this is a text editor, but it is closer to an IDE. I have many things set up to work in VS Code to help me through my day. As I’m mostly writing Clojure, Calva is a constant companion in VS Code. I use three browsers: Safari for personal stuff, Chrome for work and inspecting web pages, and Arc to play with and learn about. Safari and Chrome are used all day, every day. Warp - Terminal program built in Rust. I switched to this from iTerm2 in the past year. I’m not using one-tenth of the features offered, but it still feels like an upgrade from iTerm2. Github - I use Git for my version control and store all of my code on Github. Adobe Illustrator - used for all of my design work. Occasionally, I use Photoshop, but most of my work is in vectors, so I spend more time in Illustrator. Size Up - I’m a little embarrassed that I’m still using this software, but I love it and am used to it. Its keyboard-centric window manager lets me move windows around the screen with just my keyboard. This is a subset of the programs I have on my computer, but these are the ones I use almost every day across all my machines. These are the tools that I hope to master. ...

The book The Pragmatic Programmer was an introduction to life as a programmer. As I’ve gone through my career, there are still lessons in this book that go back to. Specifically, the section on Power Editing (Chapter 3, item 16) says: We’ve talked before about tools being an extension of your hand. Well, this applies to editors more than any other software tool. You need to be able to manipulate text as effortlessly as possible, because text is the basic raw material of programming. ...

Diagnosed with a reading and writing disability, I was late to start reading chapter books. That didn’t mean I wasn’t interested in stories. I’ve been a reader throughout my life. Of the kids in my family, I always had a book around. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to accept my reading limitation and find ways around it. Audiobooks have been a lifesaver. I voraciously consume audiobooks. I’m unsure how many years I’ve had an audible account, but I have over 300 titles in my library. I’ve listened to many of the titles more than once. ...

I only started to drink coffee around 28 years old. This is a late start to the coffee game. My father doesn’t drink it, so that may be why I got the late start. My path through coffee started with Peet’s Iced Mochas. I would get one most afternoons and became slowly addicted. Over time, I began to appreciate the taste of coffee better. At the time, I was in California, surrounded by some serious coffee roasters and shops. ...

My first dive into understanding computers began in 7th grade. I was on a Mac when I first started to learn to program. It wasn’t too long before I connected to the Internet and began to learn about Unix and Linux systems. I remember writing my first CGI script in C on a Solaris box. One of the reasons I was such a computer person was a learning disability I had been diagnosed with. I was a slow writer. I wrote about 30 words a minute by hand. Compare that to the 70 words or so I can type per minute, and you have a compelling reason for me to invest in working on a keyboard instead of using a pen. ...