My Setup

What tools I’m using to code my way in 2014

Some great developers have magical auras. They do so many awesome things that one could think: I can’t do this with my tools! But that’s not the case. Take a look on usesthis.com and see for yourself: many great men and women do what they do with what we also have.

I’m not magical, but I use some of these tools. And here is my interview.

Who are you, and what do you do?

I am a convicted gamer. I have a lust for code. Besides coding, I really like to write other things. Fiction, mostly. I’m married with a great photographer and we have a little kid who loves Plants vs Zombies and throw things out of the window. My phone included.

Besides playing I love to make games. I loved to change RPG’s rules as a Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master and I still like to do it on Unity projects.

What hardware do you use?

• A Windows laptop most of the time to write code.
• A Windows desktop as a home server, with Ubuntu installed as a second OS.
• A smartphone to browse, mail, message and play on the go.
• I play games mainly through Steam on Windows PCs.

The laptop is Core i7 LG machine with 6 GB of RAM and a 750 GB HDD. It packs a NVidia Geforce GT 555M video card, powerful enough to play some games, connected via HDMI to a TV, accompanied by a Xbox controller.

My desktop is an older machine, a Pentium Dual Core, 4 GB of RAM. It is really old, but just enough to be my server and entertain my boy with little games.

The smartphone is a Moto X. I’d have an iPhone 4 before that, and both iOS and Android are great mobile OSes.

And what software?

In the last year I changed my workflow and used much more tools than I was accustomed. I was used to code a lot in C# on Visual Studio with SQL Server databases. Today I’m more eclectic: Python, Java, C# and Javascript are my day-to-day buddies.

I’m curious with Ruby and C++ and like to play with them a little. As databases, I’ve used MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite and Google Datastore too.

I like to use command-line tools, but don’t feel so agile with them for day-to-day tasks. Except for Git and Python, which I often use shell tools, I use nice graphical tools :-)

I have much interest on game designing and development, and play with hardware on Arduino and Raspberry Pi. Got a Pi few months ago just to mess around. I’m also researching applications of Kinect as an alternate communication tool.

• Sublime Text 3 is my main place to go for code. While working with C#, I use Visual Studio and Monodevelop.
• Unity is my preferred game engine.
• Git is my favorite version control tool. I use GitHub and Bitbucket almost everyday.
• SQL Server Management Studio to manipulate SQL Server databases, PgAdmin for PostgreSQL’s databases.
• I’m using SimpleNote to take notes and control lists and tasks. Fast and simple. On some projects I use Mavenlink and Asana.
• Toggl is a simple tool to monitor my time spent coding.
• Steam is my gaming pal.
• Chrome still is the best browser out there. Period.
• I don’t always listen to music while coding, but when I do Deezeris good enough.

What would be your dream setup?

My dream setup is a PC, not so much powerful than mine, but with two large and high-res screens, in a quiet, clean, sound and child-proof room. My laptop would be much more thinner and lighter, the screen would not be useless on sunlight and the batteries would last a full day at least.

I’m not asking much, am I?

In fact, the PC doesn’t matter so much. But I would really love a child-proof room!