Who are you, and what do you do?
I'm the notorious social justice warrior Coraline Ada Ehmke. I work remotely from Chicago as a Principal Engineer for Stitch Fix. I'm an open source advocate, international speaker, and software developer with over 20 years of experience building apps for the web. I was recognized for my work on diversity in open source with a Ruby Hero award in 2016. I'm also the creator of the Contributor Covenant, the most popular open source code of conduct in the world with over 40,000 adoptions. I'm a founding panelist on the Greater Than Code podcast, and in my free time I work on a secret artificial intelligence project and write and record music as A Little Fire Scarecrow.
What hardware do you use?
2017 MacBook Pro, maxed out specs, side by side with a 27" Cinema Display. I use a Kinesis split mechanical keyboard and a Bluetooth Magic Trackpad.
In my music studio I also use a Presonus FaderPort 8, a LinnStrument MIDI controller, and an M-Audio rack mount audio interface. This lets me record my nine guitars, bass, Prophet analog synth, mountain dulcimer, and vocals and mix them to perfection. The studio is dominated by a walnut-stained Platform music production desk from Output. It's huge, solid, and versatile. It has room for nine racks worth of hardware, a two-tier work surface, and a slide-out tray for my MIDI controllers.
And what software?
If I'm doing Ruby, I do it in both Atom and BBEdit (I love the regex support in BBEdit and I've been using it since 1995!) For Go, I use Visual Studio Code; I'm fairly new to Go so I appreciate the help that an IDE gives me, and there are some great plugins for debugging and testing, too. For Swift I use Xcode. Some people might look down on me for using GUIs but I am a very visual person and I don't mind lifting my fingers off the keyboard from time to time. In the studio I use Logic X and adore it.
What would be your dream setup?
I wouldn't change a thing about my physical space. I work from home, which is great, and my desk is in a sunroom that is pretty much all windows (west-facing so I can see the gorgeous sunset at the end of my day.) I love my hardware setup but I would be even happier with two 42.5" 4k displays, one on either side of my laptop. Preferably on adjustable mounts. In the studio I would love to have a maxed-out 27" iMac dedicated to music production --- even my MacBook Pro has trouble keeping up with Logic at a decent sample rate. My Patreon is at... just kidding. Sort of.