Uses This

Who are you, and what do you do?

My name is Paul Bausch (aka. pb) and I've been a web developer at MetaFilter for around nine years. In ancient Web history I helped build the weblog tool Blogger and I wrote a few early Hacks books for O'Reilly. When I'm not behind a computer I like to be behind a camera.

What hardware do you use?

I have a 2009 Mac Pro and a 27-inch Cinema Display. I use an Apple Magic Mouse on a solid steel mousepad with the words "MAKE SHIP ITERATE" engraved into it. I have an amazing Realforce keyboard. I swapped out most of the black keys with white so they're easier to read and I have a bright red Esc key just in case. I use several external hard drives for backups including a loud 4-bay Drobo.

My desk is an old IKEA Galant with motorized sit/stand legs that they made for a while in the early 2000's. It still works great. When I'm sitting I have a well worn Mirra chair. (That's the Aeron's cheaper cousin.) When I'm standing I have an Imprint Cumulus9 mat. I have a black 60's rotary phone because I like the sound of real bells when the phone rings. I also like caller ID so I have a Raspberry Pi under my desk running Network Caller ID which shows the incoming call on my monitor.

When I visit the MetaFilter home office about an hour away I drag around an 11-inch MacBook Air in an STM laptop bag.

My main camera is a Canon 5D Mark II. I use a Mobi card in a CF adapter so I can send pictures directly to my iPhone while I'm out.

And what software?

MetaFilter is written in ColdFusion so that's my primary language. Yes, it still exists. I live in TextMate with the theme set to Solarized and the font Inconsolata. At MetaFilter we do almost everything in email so I have Gmail open all day. We also use GitHub to manage code, Slack to manage goofing off, Dropbox for files, and Google Docs for spreadsheets and think pieces. So you can see I spend a lot of time in Chrome and Chrome Developer Tools. To debug site problems in specific browsers I use iOS Simulator, Android Emulator, and a half dozen versions of Windows running in VMware Fusion.

We recently switched to writing CSS with Sass so I typically have Grunt running in the background following along and spitting out files.

On the server side I spend a lot of time in SQL Server Management Studio. I'm also frequently flipping knobs at Amazon Web Services.

I typically process photos with Photoshop, but lately I've been using VSCO cam on my iPhone. It's blasphemy.

What would be your dream setup?

I feel like I'm living the dream already. If we could get wireless electricity going it would clean up my office quite a bit.