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 Rachel White

Rachel White

Front-end engineer (IBM Watson)

Posted in developer, mac, windows

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Rachel White, and I'm a self taught Front-End Engineer for IBM Watson. I work on the part of the site that developers would go to if they wanted to use some of the cognitive computing services for Watson. Pretty much all of the information about what Watson does, the APIs and docs live on the site that I help build and maintain.

In my spare time I'm actively working on multiple video games, including a VR Cat Cafe project. I'm also really into glitchy graphics, horror films, and sfx makeup. I have a lot of very different hobbies, :).

What hardware do you use?

When I'm at work, I have a dual monitor setup, they're these really nice Dell Ultrasharp borderless monitors... I have them set up behind my 15" MacBook Pro.

At home, I have a custom PC I built a few years ago. It's all in a Corsair 750D case, which is a beast!! It's seriously about half of my height.

Here are its specs:

  • Intel Core i5-4670K 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor
  • Corsair H110 94.0 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler
  • ASRock Z87 Extreme4 ATX LGA1150 Motherboard
  • Corsair Vengeance 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory
  • EVGA GeForce GTX 770 2GB Superclocked ACX Video Card

The rest of the components you can see here.

I have a really crappy monitor with it and a crappy mouse and keyboard. I mostly use it for gaming, and as my media library I use for streaming.

I also have my own 13" MacBook Pro I use for personal projects, game dev, and just regular usage. It's very cute and covered in cats and feminism.

Rachel's cute MacBook Pro, covered in stickers.

And what software?

Sublime Text with ITG Flat theme along with this Pastel color scheme - I'm always open to a better pastel on dark theme, though!

For CLI I use iTerm with oh-my-zsh alongside a custom theme I made.

Git / GitHub for version control.

Photoshop & Illustrator for working with comps from designers, and for when I'm creating my own graphics for personal projects.

I'm currently learning Unity & Maya & Blender for the VR projects I'm working on as well.

What would be your dream setup?

An apartment bigger than my Brooklyn one, with a ton of desk space so I can have enough space to work with my PC, Macbook, and hardware projects. I used to live in a 1200sq ft apartment in St. Louis, and moved alllll my things to my 750sq ft place that I share with my roommate, so I've been trying to get rid of about half of the things I own so things are less cluttered and I just feel calm and comfortable in my space. If my room isn't clean, it's hard for me to be productive.

Some 4K borderless monitors would be nice too.