Setup

Most of my life I used Windows for gaming, and Linux for development. When I started my first full time job in 2007, they gave me a Windows desktop for Java dev, and I hated it… In 2010 they added a BYOC policy and two devs I worked with convinced me to buy my first ever Mac, and since then, that’s what I’ve been using. Mainly because I dialed in my perfect setup early, and migrating an old Mac to a new Mac is super easy, and once I got my iPad and eventually settled on iPhone (after jumping between that and Android every 2 years for a while), I was locked into the ecosystem, and no matter how much it gets enshittified, I just haven’t been able to migrate away (and I’ve tried, quite a few times). ...

I was on LinkedIn this morning making a quick post about my experience with Omarchy, and then this showed up in my feed. “Local dev setup makes zero sense to me now.” It’s a comment from Matt Pocock, who we all know by now, the TypeScript educator, creator of the /grill-me skill that half the industry has been grilled by at this point (including myself), with a clip from The Pragmatic Engineer podcast. The post goes on: every dev has a hundred terminals, those terminals should be available to your whole organisation, available from everywhere. So for him that means he’s on a train chatting to his Hetzner box in Discord, and therefore an expensive laptop feels like wasted compute. ...

Introduction In some ways, a lot has changed since my last post, and in other ways, not much has changed. There has been a big shift in the last 12 months, especially toward “agentic engineering” and how we run multi-agent AFK setups vs HITL as we have been. I touched on this in my introduction to the tool I’m working on as well, which, spoiler, is part of my toolchain. Kinda. It’s a WIP… ...

Introduction I keep saying my next post won’t be about AI, and then inevitably, I post something about AI. It’s hard to ignore, it’s the big bubble we are dealing with, and there is so much hype that needs to be ignored and filtered so we can get to the actually good stuff… I’ve been playing around with various tools over the last 3 or 4 months, and I think I’ve settled into what I find to be most useful for me. And while the topic says no-one asked, truth is, this actually does come up in a few discussions on other platforms and groups I’m part of, so I figured I’d love to share, but more importantly, hear what others are doing and why you agree or disagree with me. ...

LOLWUT. Random. Yes. Kinda. So here’s the thing; I recently watched a reaction video by ThePrimeTime for a clip about the “Best Programming Setup” from the Lex Fridman interview with John Carmack, and for some reason it sparked an urge to write about something. The specific bit was here (from around 19:45 to 21:12), where John talked about making the move from 2 to 3 monitors, and Prime commented on being a 1 monitor person. ...