Uses This

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is C J Silverio, and I program computers, design software systems, and make teams work better. Right now I'm Principal Engineer at Eaze Technologies, a San Francisco company that provides services for legal cannabis delivery in California and Oregon.

What hardware do you use?

Macintosh all the way. My first computer was an Apple ][+ and my second was a Mac Plus. The habit remains. Right now I have an older Mac Pro hooked up to all my music-making hardware, and two MacBook Pros for programming work. One is a 13" with one of the bad keyboards, and the other is an employer-issued 15" with a good keyboard.

I have an iPhone X and one of the newer Apple Watches. I was extremely suspicious of the watch, and I could lose it tomorrow and probably not be all that upset.

And what software?

iTerm2 is my terminal app. I switched from zsh to Fish shell a few years ago.

Bear for note-taking and writing text intended for consumption outside of a git repo. (I'm using Bear to write this!) I like that it syncs and I can continue editing on my iPhone if I need to. I write almost everything in Markdown if I can, which makes Deckset the idea slide presentation app for me.

I run Visual Studio Code for most other text editing. I keep the amazingly solid, trusty BBEdit around for heavy text lifting.

In the terminal, I'll reach for vim, which I invoke as vi not vim because I am old and my fingers do things in the shell without conscious thought.

I use Tweetbot on Mac and iOS for Twitter. My Mastodon app of choice on iOS is Mast.

I run Airmail on Mac & iOS to unify all my inboxes and so I can read email in a native application.

My daily driver browser is Safari. It is the best Macintosh application of all the browsers available today. I run Choosy for on the fly choice about which browser to open a specific link with. My ad blocker is uBlock Origin.

I do my calendaring with Fantastical. It offers a wonderful UX for adding new events quickly.

For diagramming, I use the amazing Omnigraffle.

I customize my Mac experience with a lot of little utilities. I love experimenting with new tools and I'll rotate new things in & out of my running set frequently. These have managed to stick around, however:

• Alfred as my app launcher, with a number of workflows for things like reminding me about http status codes
• Bartender for managing the zillion menu bar icons on smaller screens.
• Dropzone for dragging and dropping across workspaces.
• 1Password for password management.
• Moom for snapping window sizes.

Recently I've been trying out this little calculator app called Numi.

I use Fira Code everywhere I need a monospaced typeface. It has those sweet ligatures that make certain symbol combinations look like single characters, which helps code legibility for me.

What would be your dream setup?

I would like a 13" MacBook Pro with a working keyboard. When I'm dreaming, I'll add to that 16GB of memory at least, a huganic SSD, and a battery that lasts 12 hours. (Maybe it's rocking an ARM processor?) But really, give me a working keyboard, a real ESC key, and the finger print reader on a current-generation MacBook, and I'd be happy.