Inspired by the developers I follow on Twitter and admire, I'd thought I'd put together my own 'uses' / setup page, though at least hardware wise I work a lot simpler than most, sticking to just using my Mac on its own outside of my employment!
PhpStorm has been my IDE of choice since 2014, for a long time I just used it with the default dark theme and configuration, however in the past couple of years I have customized it a little more.
I use the Material Theme UI plugin and the Atom One Dark theme, I have a lot of the built in toolbars disabled, but I still have a couple open, and I prefer working with the tabs visible, I have tried it a few times with them disabled, but I usually end up missing them and turning them back on! I usually work with the side bar open too with the file browser, unless I have the workspace split with two files open at once.
I am a fan of iTerm2 with Z Shell and Oh My Zsh, I have a few plugins installed (Which I really need to document more!) and several aliases
I use SequelAce to manage and connecting to MySQL Databases.
Laravel Herd is my go to for local development work, it’s just so seamless. Drop a project in my code folder, head to project.test, and it’s up and running!
If I need to test any calls to an API, then Postman is my default tool.
I don’t customise macOS too heavily. I usually keep most apps in full screen and swipe between them. The dock is hidden by default, only showing open apps with the smallest possible icons when I move my cursor to the bottom.
For app launching and general navigation, I use Alfred, bound to Option + Space — it’s second nature at this point. I almost never use the built-in app browser.
Other daily apps
Email - I use Mimestream, having switched from Spark in late 2022.
Browsers - I use both Firefox and Chrome - Firefox for general day to day browsing, and Chrome for dev work.
Git - I prefer a GUI and use GitKraken. I’m comfortable with the terminal, but for certain things, a GUI is just easier.
Most of my personal projects are hosted on Digital Ocean droplets, but one are two are now also on Laravel Cloud
I’m not a big fan of fiddling with server configs, so I use Laravel Forge to handle provisioning and setup. For simple projects, Forge also handles deployment, but larger sites like Coeliac Sanctuary use Laravel Envoyer for zero-downtime deploys.
I use Google Workspaces to manage email addresses needed for any of my personal websites.
For any automatic sending of email, such as transactional or from a campaign is done through Amazon SES.
Email Campaign Management and logging of transactional emails is done through the fantastic Mailcoach by Spatie.
Most of my projects just store files in the main filesystem, however on Coeliac Sanctuary all images are stored on Amazon S3.
I like to keep things simple outside of work - just me on the sofa, or sat in bed after the little one has gone to sleep, with my MacBook.
I use a 2020 16" Macbook pro, 2.3ghz 8-Core i9, 16gb RAM and 1tb SSD. for all my personal work.
I have a desk space and dedicated equipment when working during my employment, but I try to keep my personal work and employment work separate and do not sit at my desk outside of work hours.
I have been an Android fan since 2012. My current phone is the Google Pixel 9 Pro XL.
I have owned a Fitbit device since 2017, most recently was the Versa 2, but when I pre-ordered the new Pixel 7 Pro prior to release, the free gift was the new Google Pixel watch, which also integrates perfectly with Fitbit, the only downside is having to charge it daily (I tend to put it on at night before bed while I'm reading) - but I've got used to it now!