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 David Cramer

David Cramer

Developer, infrastructure nerd (DISQUS)

Posted in developer, mac, windows

Who are you, and what do you do?

I lead infrastructure development at DISQUS, as well maintain and drive many of the open source initiatives. In addition I also develop Sentry, and operate GetSentry.com in my spare time.

What hardware do you use?

I work on several machines, all wired up with various fancy cloud syncing technologies.

At the office, I have a 27" iMac, as well as a 15" MacBook Pro which travels with me between home, work, and play. While the iMac is new, and hasn't been upgraded yet, the two year old MacBook is running a 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5, 8 GB of memory, an Intel X25-M SSD, and a secondary storage 500 GB disk (to replace the optical drive).

While I'm at home I have a custom built Windows PC, specifically built for trolling people in StarCraft II. It has a slightly outdated Intel Core 2 Duo, an EVGA GeForce 460 GTX, 8 GB of memory, and an Intel 320 Series SSD, as well as another 6 TB of storage.

On the go I still run an iPhone 4 to keep up with Twitter and email. Additionally I just acquired a fantastic new Sony NEX-5N for upping my game in amateur photography.

And what software?

My Mac's run nearly identical software. For keeping my life sane, I use the Twitter Mac client, Sparrow for email, Adium and Skype for messaging, and Linkinus for communicating via IRC. Additionally I use Sublime Text 2 for coding and iTerm 2 as a terminal replacement. For minor utilities I run several little apps, including CloudApp, DropBox, Caffeine, iStat Menu 3, and Viscosity.

For my Windows machine, I try to keep everything mostly familiar. I don't bother with Twitter, email, or IM (other than Skype), but I use mIRC for IRC. I also avoid running a development environment, so I simply use Putty to SSH into one of my other machines (or servers) to get what I need done. Of course I also run DropBox and Viscosity as well on Windows. I'm also an extremely heavy user of Steam for purchasing the numerous games that I never play.

What would be your dream setup?

My dream setup wouldn't be too far off from what I have. I'd love to swap out my home desktop machine with a Mac, but unfortunately they haven't quite broken into the gaming industry all the way yet. I would also switch the iMac at the office for a very high specced Mac Desktop, as well as upgrading the MacBook Pro to the new Retina display.

It's also likely I'd throw a few other random devices around, which I'd already own if it wasn't for the fact that I'd never use them, including an Apple TV and one of the new Surface tablets.