Who are you, and what do you do?
I'm Chris Coyier. I co-founded a social coding site for front-end developers called CodePen. I run a site where I write about building websites, along with a small staff of writers and lots of guest authors called CSS-Tricks. And I also have a podcast with my friend Dave Rupert called ShopTalk Show, which is all about, perhaps you can guess it: building websites.
What hardware do you use?
I'm a fairly cliché Mac guy. After my first Commodore 64 (and then 128), the only computers I've ever had have been from Apple. I'm a longtime loyalist in that way and I don't regret a second of it. I use the 2018 MacBook Pro tricked out as much as they would sell it to me. It's the main tool for my job, so I've always made sure I had the best equipment I can. A heaping helping of luck and privilege have baked themselves into moderate success for me such that I can afford that.
At the office, I plug it into two of those LG UltraFine 4k monitors, a Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard, and a Logitech MX Master mouse. I plug in some Audioengine A2s for speakers. Between all those extras, the desk is more cluttered in wires than I would like and I look forward to an actually wireless future.
I'm only at the office say 60% of the time and aside from that just use the MacBook Pro as it is. I'm probably a more efficient coder at the office, but my work is a lot of email and editing and social media and planning and such that is equally efficient away from the fancy office setup.
And what software?
- Notion for tons of stuff. Project planning. Meeting notes. Documentation. Public documents.
- Things for personal TODO lists.
- BusyCal for calendaring.
- 1Password for password, credit cards, and other secure documents and notes.
- Slack for team and community chat.
- Whatsapp for family chat.
- Zoom for business face to face chat and group podcasting.
- Audio Hijack for locally recording podcasts.
- FaceTime for family face to face chat.
- ScreenFlow for big long-form screen recordings.
- Kap for small short-form screen recordings.
- CleanMyMac for tidying up.
- Local for local WordPress development.
- VS Code for writing code.
- TablePlus for dealing with databases.
- Tower for Git.
- iTerm for command line work.
- Figma for design.
- Mailplane to have a tabbed in-dock closable Gmail app.
- Bear for notes/Markdown writing.
What would be your dream setup?
I'd happily upgrade to a tricked out 16" MacBook Pro. If I'm just throwing money at things I'd also happily take Apple's Pro Display XDR's, but the price on those is a little frightening. I already have it pretty good, so I don't do a ton of dreaming out what could be better.