Who are you, and what do you do?
I write software and write stuff on the internet. I was one of the first engineers at Ksplice, where I worked on our kernel hot-patching technology as well as the build infrastructure and update-distribution system. For the last seven years, I've worked at Stripe, where I worked on all kinds of infrastructure and software design projects. Recently I was a founding member of the Sorbet team, helping build design and build a static typechecker for Ruby that's now open-source and in use at Stripe and numerous other Ruby development shops.
Outside of work, I've developed a handful of open-source projects, including the CrossMe collaborative crossword puzzle app, the livegrep source-code search tool, and reptyr, a tool for moving programs between terminals on Linux and FreeBSD.
I also write about software and software engineering. I run a personal blog that's mostly about software and writing software, and maintain the Accidentally Quadratic tumblr account, documenting instances of software performance problems caused by inadvertent quadratic behavior.
What hardware do you use?
Right now, my main laptop is a Google Pixelbook with maxed specs. I develop inside the Crostini VM environment to get a real Linux environment. I love the Pixelbook's hardware and find Chrome OS reasonably reliable and pleasant to work with (and it has nice security properties), but I'm getting a bit tired of not having root on my own hardware. I use the Pixel stylus and the laptop in tablet mode for reading or taking notes on PDFs (academic papers or the like).
I maintain a dedicated server hosted with 1&1 IONOS for my personal website and other hosting projects. For personal use I find having a single server much easier to administer than a complex cloud setup in AWS or GCE, and you can get much more RAM and CPU per dollar with physical hardware.
I'm pretty solidly bought into the Google ecosystem (for better or worse) these days, so I tend to use the latest or latest minus 1 Google-branded Android phone, which means a Pixel 3 right now.
As to gadgets, I love my Jabra Elite 65t true wireless ear buds on the go, but prefer Bose QC2s when I'm traveling on an airplane, or the Sennheiser HD 280 Pro for all-day listening at my desk.
I wear a FitBit Charge 3, although I mostly only use it as a watch (and occasionally the built-in timer); I don't use it that much as a fitness or activity tracker. I love my Kindle Oasis for reading books, and have been on the Kindle train for many years now.
And what software?
I've been a Linux-on-the-desktop person since 2005 or so, with occasional defections to the Apple universe, mostly when my work required it. As mentioned earlier I currently run Chrome OS, with a Debian development environment inside the Crostini VM, but I tend to prefer Ubuntu on my non-Pixelbook hardware. Servers tend to get the latest LTS release, and my laptops track more bleeding-edge. I'm over my window-manager hacking days and tend to just use whatever the default desktop environment is on any installation I have.
Especially after a few years working on the kernel at Ksplice, I prefer Linux to other environments largely because I've gotten incredibly good at debugging it. No matter what's going wrong on my laptop, by now I probably have the skill set to at least know where to start investigating, which I've come to really value.
I'm a diehard Emacs user, and while I have basic proficiency in many other editors (I even deliberately reach for vim over ssh sessions when I need a fast startup time), I can't really imagine ever leaving Emacs. I still stubbornly use it even when working in Java or other environments with strong IDEs — there are too many keybindings burned too deep into my psyche. My .emacs is available on GitHub and I'm still relatively actively evolving it. Recently I got lsp-mode set up, which has been quite nice for the languages with mature server implementations.
I used to be a heavier org-mode user but a few years ago I stopped using it for my TODO lists. I still use a handful of org-mode buffers for lab notebooking, though, especially when debugging something tricky or doing extending performance work.
I use Hugo to host my blog, but tend to compose posts (and other documents — like these answers!) in Dropbox Paper. I find the minimalist UI and the combination of Markdown-esque input with WYSIWYG formatting to be an incredibly pleasant authoring environment.
On the server, I've played with a bunch of different tech stacks, but currently I run out of a single relatively straightforward docker-compose setup to orchestrate all the pieces running on my personal infrastructure.
What would be your dream setup?
Even as everything moves to the cloud, I tend to stubbornly cling to wanting my development environments and tools local. I've definitely been pondering getting a desktop again, so I can have a huge number of cores and all the RAM sitting right under my desk. Being able to build the Linux kernel in just a few minutes without having to ssh anywhere is quite appealing, and I have aspirations of scaling up livegrep by a few powers of 10; it'd be lovely to just fit that work locally without having to ssh anywhere. It's hard to beat the convenience of a local editor and local everything else.