Who are you, and what do you do?
My name is Scott Hanselman and I'm a teacher and a programmer. I've been writing code for money for over 30 years. I've been blogging for 20 years and I've been podcasting for 16 years. I also have a YouTube. I guess people say content creator these days, but I prefer professional enthusiast. I'm very excited about the power that tech provides us, and I want other people to feel that powerful. This is all the stuff that I do on the side, but in my day job I work on open source and C#, and support the .NET community at Microsoft. I also work with the Windows and Surface divisions.
What hardware do you use?
My main desktop is a custom built system component PC that I got at Newegg. Right now it's an 10th Gen Intel i9, 64 gigs of RAM, and two Seagate Pro SSD's that are one and two terabytes respectively. I have an Nvidia 3080 video card. I have a Ubiquiti Pro home network, and dual-provider Internet. Since I live in a rural part of Oregon I need my Internet to be reliable. I have a Synology NAS, and a reasonably sophisticated home assistant setup for IoT. I really like making sure that components live and last as long as they can, and I optimize for the simplest solution I can possibly come up with. If my desktop fails, I have a Surface Laptop Studio as a backup.
And what software?
I run Windows 11, and then under that I use WSL, and I hop between Fedora and Ubuntu. In the cloud I run on Linux in Azure in containers. I use Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, Adobe Creative Suite, Paint.NET, and I'm a huge fan of PWAs (Progressive Web Apps). I run Outlook and Gmail as pinned PWAs under Edge.
What would be your dream setup?
If money was no object, I would probably buy a $5000 top of the line whatever is the latest desktop. But my high end machine was about $2000, and I find that it will easily last four or five years, so I just can't justify a high end system. I like being able to upgrade an SSD, swap out the processor, or add more memory to give a system more life. This machine is heading towards its 4th year and I just upgrade pieces here and there.