As a person that has been working remotely for a long time (7+ years of experience) I get a lot of questions regarding my setup and how I’m able to focus on my daily tasks when working from home.
A few of the links below are affiliate links which means I get paid or rewarded in some way if you use them to purchase, but rest assured these are all tools and services I actually use.
Workstation
MacBook Pro 16”, M1 Pro (10 cores / 16 GPU cores), 16GB of RAM (2021)
This is my personal computer, and it does not reflect what I use on my day-to-day work environment, but it's a great machine to develop my personal projects
My pet got used to the sound of me pressing keys on my keyboard, and I'm glad cuz I missed mechanical keyboards, this model isn't perfect and it has a few issues but it's a decent board for my needs.
For the same reasons I replaced my MX Master 1 for the second edition, I recently replaced my Master 2 for the 3rd edition. What was the reason you may ask? I dropped it by mistake and it was a terrible drop.
Well, it has all the bells and whistles of the LG 5K UltraFine display but with a better panel and a better build quality.
Fully Jarvis Standing desk (Extended version)
Love these legs, they are near silent when raising or lowering and they can lift enough weight, that’s why I bought an IKEA kitchen counter of almost 2m long to get a huge workspace area.
Software
The best IDE when developing with JavaScript or TypeScript, I love the keyboard shortcuts and the built-in elements of it for testing purposes.
Darker than Darcula and the other defaults from Intellij, it has a big advantage over themes based in Material Design, which is, you don’t have to install anything extra that slows down your IDE to customize the colors.
I find the ligatures helpful but felt that Fira Retina for coding was getting a bit out of hand with these. I also like using Menlo which is a default from macOS, but it does not have any of the helpful ligatures.
Extends great keyboard shortcuts over the built-in terminal in macOS.
It’s free, looks good, and works better than the other options.
The best non resource hungry software for pair programming.
Design
I know all the cool kids probably moved to Figma or Framer, but I find the native UI of Sketch much much faster than those software and it keeps it simple.
This is my favorite software for editing photos, I got into Pixelmator on 2011 and have been a fan of their work since then.
Podcasting / Streaming
I upgraded from a Blue Yeti to this Microphone and I’m amazed by the difference in sound quality that it delivers.
Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 3rd Gen
I love the physical knobs and the visual feedback from the LED wheel for how loud you are speaking.
It’s a solid preamp for those moments where I don’t want to be as close to the microphone, usually when talking to my co-workers over Zoom or when pair-programming.
Beyerdynamic DT 990 Pro headphones
I use them to monitor my own voice when I’m recording but also, to listen to music, it’s such a good pair of headphones, their sound quality can be compared with much much higher price headphones.
I use this to record all of my podcast, even the ones where we talk over Skype, FaceTime or others. Amazing software, highly recommended.
It’s free, it’s ok. If I get more into livestreaming and get a benefit from them, I would consider investing on a more polished software.