Who are you, and what do you do?
Geoffrey Grosenbach. I'm the founder of PeepCode (recently acquired by Pluralsight), video education and entertainment for professional designers and developers (along with about 8 other employees and contractors).
When not at a computer, I get creatively rejuvenated by riding and racing bicycles on dirt.
What hardware do you use?
I do most of my computering on Apple products. Full size 15" MacBook Pro with both an SSD and a HDD (in place of the DVD drive). The high resolution matte screen option is a must for me. iPhone 5, Retina iPad.
I carry a Sony FS-100 video camera around the world for filming designers and developers in action. It has a great dynamic range and is great in low or unpredictable light. And there is a physical button or lever for almost everything you need to do, so it can be setup and fine-tuned quickly.
Nikon D7000 DSLR with prime lenses in 14mm, 35mm, 50mm, and 100mm. We have an adapter so they work with the Sony video camera. It's nice to need only one brand of lens for all our cameras.
Pelican cases of various sizes, including the 1510. It's the maximum carry-on size for most airlines. I use the divider pack instead of foam for maximum storage capacity.
Sennheiser mics, including an MKE600 boom mic and EW 100 G3 wireless mics.
Zoom H4n self-contained portable stereo mic. Most of our interviews are live, with only one take, so we try to shoot multiple camera angles and audio recordings to give us the greatest amount of flexibility when editing.
ioSafe portable hard drive for backup in the field. They can supposedly survive an encounter with a steam roller without losing data.
Powerex battery charger. Charges batteries quickly and independently so I can just cram a bunch of AAs in there and it will do the right thing for each one.
8 TB G-drive Thunderbolt hard drive for backup. It's fast enough to edit from directly if I need to.
Humanscale chair, Anthro desks for standing or sitting. Ergotron monitor arms for working comfortably.
Away from work, my hardware looks like this:
Yeti ASR5 Carbon full suspension mountain bike. Fox suspension, Shimano gearing. This bike deserves to finish races many places higher than it does when I'm sitting on it.
333fab titanium cyclocross bike. Welded from scratch for me with all my favorite components and a custom paint job.
And what software?
Adobe Software. I'm a huge fan of After Effects. My production workflow became much easier once I started using Premiere Pro and Adobe's video encoding tools.
PluralEyes for Premiere Pro. For most videos we end up with multiple camera angles, audio tracks, and screen capture. PluralEyes does a pretty good job of aligning it all so we can work like a broadcast studio and switch between each for the best final video.
Things for brainstorms, lists, and daily tasks. While I'm still hoping for a comprehensive multi-user task manager for business and personal, Things has the best combination of offline speed and multi-device sync.
Emacs for text editing. Most of the time I don't know what my fingers are typing. They just do what I'm thinking. To me, that's the definition of a great text editor.
What would be your dream setup?
Until 2009, I did 90% of my work on a beefy desktop tower and wouldn't consider any other machine for serious work. Multi-core, multi-drive, full power. I slowly transitioned to being able to do all my work on a 15" MacBook Pro, which is faster than the 8-core Mac Pro tower I have at home.
But I still wish Apple would make a laptop for video professionals. 2TB storage. 16 CPU cores. Huge battery to fuel it for 8 or 10 hours at full steam. High resolution matte screen. I don't care how big it is or if it weighs 10 or 15 pounds.