Uses This

A collection of nerdy interviews asking people from all walks of life what they use to get the job done.

A picture of Brad Fitzpatrick

Brad Fitzpatrick

Developer (LiveJournal, memcached)

Posted in developer, linux, mac

Who are you, and what do you do?

I'm Brad Fitzpatrick. I'm a programmer and have been writing code and having fun with it since I was 5. I'm known for LiveJournal, memcached, OpenID, gearman, as well as various other open source projects. At Google I've worked on social, bits of Gmail, App Engine, Android for about 2 years, and most recently the Go programming language.

What hardware do you use?

My main desktop at home is 2005 Mac Mini running Linux. I upgraded the RAM and added an Intel SSD to it. It's very old and slow but it's pretty quiet and I'm too lazy to replace it. I also have a beefy quad-core i7 server in my garage with some SSDs and and an external 12 disk array, also on UPS. At 200 Paul in SF I also have some older hardware racked. I run Xen in 200 Paul and KVM at home. I also have VMs at prgmr.com, Rackspace, and Amazon EC2. I have more VMs all over the place than I can count. (I started a spreadsheet recently but I think it's incomplete.)

At work I have an x200 laptop, a MacBook Pro (rarely booted), a few VMs, and a z600 (16 cores, 12 GB RAM) with a 30" display. Oh, I also have a Windows machine at home for testing things about once a month.

And what software?

Linux (Ubuntu and Debian), Chrome, emacs, screen, Go, Perl, gcc, Gimp, tcpdump, wireshark, Xen, KVM, libvirt. etc. I have a Windows machine for occasional testing, as well as a Mac, but rarely use either of them.

What would be your dream setup?

I'd like fewer machines. :-) But I should probably upgrade this crappy desktop. I'm thinking a MacBook Air 11" with a Thunderbolt Display would be good. I figure I can just run virtualized Linux maximized on it and only go into OS X for testing.