Uses

Inspired by an endless array of similar catalogues, this page offers a list of the things I’m using regularly: the software and computing hardware I rely on; my current office setup; my personal uniform; the things I carry daily, etc.

A general unifying theme, for me, is a kind of pragmatic ‘respect for the defaults’. My recent switch from ‘vim with an incredibly small .vimrc’ to ‘vscode for most things’ was reluctant, to say the least. I think there’s a lot of value in carefully picking a small number of well-made tools — and understanding them deeply — rather than the yak-shaving and endless tweaking of a more ‘custom’ setup. This is particularly true in my own professional domain — ‘academic’ software engineering — where work is often done in a hurry, on a shoestring budget, and ‘useable research outcomes’ are the only thing that really matters.

Software

You can see a more complete config in my dotfiles repo.

Language-wise: I used to rely heavily on R/RMarkdown, then shifted to Python/Jupyter Notebooks for coordination reasons. I still use these occasionally but, as the nature of my work has changed, I’ve ended up loving the reduction in anxiety offered by Clojure & Clojurescript.

My current default new-project stack is: the luminus framework, with reagent/reframe for the frontend, reitit for routing & API stuff, postgres as my backend database, and heroku for hosting.

Dev

Productivity

Social

Research & Consumption

Security

Forecasting

Quantified Self

Miscellaneous

Hardware

Daily Carry

Office

Personal Uniform

In Pattern Recognition, Gibson writes, of the clothes that his protagonist wears, that they are the kind of items that “ideally seem to have come into this world without human intervention”; that

what people take for relentless minimalism is a side effect of too much exposure to the reactor-cores of fashion […] she can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000. She’s a design-free zone, a one-woman school of and whose very austerity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult.

Like most people who wear basically the same thing every day, exclusively in black, that’s pretty much the fantasy I’m trying to fulfil.