Uses This

Who are you, and what do you do?

Hi! I'm Daniel Schauenberg and currently I'm a Staff Engineer on Etsy's fleet management and provisioning team. I've previously worked on the DevTools team at Etsy and in former jobs I was an embedded systems engineer and a network/systems administrator at a chemical plant before that.

What hardware do you use?

In terms of hardware I use an 11" MacBook Air as my personal laptop, and have the same model for work in conjunction with a 27" Thunderbolt Display, Apple Wireless Keyboard, and Apple Trackpad. It's honestly the best laptop I have ever owned, and I can't imagine ever going with a different size (although Apple's current laptop lineup suggests that I will have to at some point).

I have Sennheiser HD 280 Pro headphones at work and also burn through a pair of Sennheiser CX 300‑II in-ear headphones about once a year. But they are still the best ones I've found so far.

I recently acquired an iPhone SE after my trusty, almost 4 year old iPhone 5 got too slow, and I have a 1st gen iPad mini that I barely use. My phone is connected to a Pebble Time but I have most notifications disabled. I have a root server at Hetzner that hosts most of my stuff, an HP microserver at home for backups, and built my own homerouter on an apu1d4 board. And I love my YubiKeys (I have a 4 for work and a NEO for personal stuff) which I mostly use for 2FA on my servers and home router (via Duo Security) and for signing git commits.

And what software?

A lot of my work revolves around text files (code, journal, notes, ..) so the two pieces of software I probably interact with most are vim and git. Most of the time I write bash, Ruby, PHP or Go, and I use Make religiously to automate as much as possible, sign git commits with GPG, read email in mutt and generally live in a bunch of nested tmux sessions in a fullscreen iTerm2 terminal. I use Ledger for my accounting, which stays with the theme of being a bunch of text files, tracked in git, and automated with make.

For productivity and tracking what I have to do I rely a ton on OmniFocus, for which I have some scripts to pull in things from JIRA at work, GitHub issues (.com and our enterprise install), and email I need to reply to.

I listen to music in either iTunes or Amazon Music (RIP Rdio) depending on what I want to listen to. I use a version of Skitch from 2012 that still supports WebDAV uploads so I can host my screenshots on S3 via s3itch hosted on Heroku. I also run my own URL shortener on there. I use macOS on the laptops and run FreeBSD on all my servers. I try to run as much stuff as possible myself, so my personal infrastructure is made up of things like ownCloud (for WebDAV, CalDAV, and CardDAV), Sendmail, Dovecot, Nagios, Graphite, procmail, and Fetchmail. All my servers (including my home router) run ZFS and are managed by Chef.

On my iPhone I mostly use Tweetbot, Instagram, Reeder (<3 RSS), Calm, and a combination of Working Copy and Editorial to clone git repos on my phone and take notes or write blog posts. I also use Pocket a lot, to the point where I had ~2000 articles backlogged. So I wrote a tool I called pocketcleaner which runs on one of my servers and trims down the list to the 20 newest entries every Sunday night.

What would be your dream setup?

I basically have my dream set up in a lot of ways. It would be awesome if I didn't have to charge my MacBook Air so often, and I would love it if macOS had kept closer to its UNIX roots. But otherwise I'm really enjoying my setup.