Who are you, and what do you do?
I'm Holden Karau, I work on open source big data tools (mostly Apache Spark) for my day job. Outside of my day job I run a write technical books (maybe one day non-technical as well), organize a queer motorcycle/scooter club, and try to make healthcare more accessible (by fighting with health insurance companies). I also run a small ISP at Hurricane Electric's Fremont 2 location - our customers are mostly folks who want a backup link or to get full v6 routes (see HE v. Cogent IPv6 peering dispute).
What hardware do you use?
I use a wide mix of hardware. At my day job I mostly use a ThinkPad w/32gb RAM along with an EC2 instance for compiling multiple versions of Spark at the same time.
In my personal life I use a Framework laptop (love the idea of upgradable) with a 12th gen Intel i7-1260 and 64gb RAM. On a side note I've already had those memory modules go bad once and replaced them (likely my fault given my habit of programming in the bath tub).
My desktop is Ryzen 9 with an RTX 4090 for model inference (and it also runs my 4 monitors).
I do my streaming from an old Dell XPS that I got replaced under warranty.
My non-work cluster is a mix of ARM and x86 machines (from Raspberry Pi to Jetson AGX). The main challenge with that has been the power consumption so as time goes on I'll probably continue to replace the x86 machines with ARM when they fail (but the failure time on these servers is generally pretty far out).
Home network is perhaps slightly over engineered with a Mikrotik Core router, UniFi APs (which I don't love but they do the job for now) and three upstreams. The upstream on my home network are Sonic (local fiber ISP), Monkey Brains (local wireless ISP), and a small capped T-Mobile backup (with a Netgear M5).
For model training I've used LambdaLabs w/ A100s.
Our 3D printer is a VORON 2.4.
And what software?
I spend most of my life in a mixture of eMacs, Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs. My happiness on a daily basis is probably index to my % of time spent in eMacs and outside vs in Gmail/Meet.
What would be your dream setup?
So I'm pretty close to my dream setup in most ways. Probably a re-circulating heating bath tub so I could do more bath tub programming.