
David Heinemeier Hansson's Setup - vijaydev
http://david.heinemeier.hansson.usesthis.com/
======
jgrahamc
So how about we turn this into a what's your set up thread?

Hardware: I'll get started. I have three Macs: a Mac Pro, a MacBook Pro, and a
MacBook Air. I also have an iPhone. The MacPro and the Air were bought by my
company, the MacBook Pro is my personal machine.

I find myself using the MacBook Air a lot. I can take it anywhere with me.
When I'm not using it, I'm using the iPhone. If the Air had a SIM card slot
I'd probably use it even more.

On the MacPro I have a 24" Samsung monitor. All the other machines I use with
their native screens. I also have a Kindle.

Software: I use emacs for writing and coding. I use a mixture of Firefox and
Chrome for most everything else since so much of my computer life is in the
cloud. Bits of software I love are: Dropbox, Notifo, Evernote and TweetDeck.

~~~
cperciva
Dell XPS M1530 laptop; FreeBSD 7.3; KDE 3.5.10. Konqueror for websites where
it works, Firefox when necessary. Thunderbird for email. Text editing in
kwrite unless I'm in the middle of doing something in a Konsole, in which case
I'll probably use nano. Backups via tarsnap, of course.

On servers, mostly FreeBSD 8.0 (a few boxes are still 7.x), along with djbdns,
qmail, ezmlm, apache, stunnel, and tarsnap.

On my android phone: Twidroid, ConnectBot, NetCounter.

~~~
iuguy
Upvoted for XPS M1530 - what an amazing laptop.

For work I use an XPS M1530 with Windows 7, VMWare and a collection of images
with different OSes for various purposes. Notepad++ for editing, Eclipse +
PyDev for development, Ollydbg and Immunity Debugger for vulnerability
research, too many tools to list for penetration testing, OpenOffice for
documents and spreadsheets, Google Talk, Thunderbird for mail and TSK and
Responder for Disk and Memory forensics.

We have some servers at work, mostly Mac Mini and Linux (to host VMWare,
various images from Beos to Sco Unixware), Solaris Sparc box and an old
Vaxstation running VMS.

At home I use a 9 year old Vaio SRX-51P/B with a P3 850, 256mb of RAM and Arch
Linux. I mostly use Mutt, Chromium, Irssi, centerim, Vim, MC and snownews.

At home I use an Ubuntu 8.04 server mostly for media, printing, DNS (was using
djbdns but switched to dnsmasq after a rebuild) and backups and a separate
Arch Linux desktop as a MythTV Front/Backend.

~~~
cperciva
_XPS M1530 - what an amazing laptop._

Actually, I rather dislike the M1530, at least compared with my previous
laptop, a D600. The M1530 tends to get _very_ hot.

------
axod
Is it just me who expected to see a list of hair styling products? ;)

~~~
dhh
Currently, American Crew medium hold/shine. Occasionally, Bubble & Bubble #5.

But of course the real secret is in how you apply just the right swirl.

~~~
axod
Thanks. Might have to check those out :)

I always end up with half my hair like its been dipped in honey, and the other
half dry as a bone when I use anything. I'm probably making some n00b error
though :/

~~~
run4yourlives
Rub it into your hands first and then apply it to your head.

And don't use so much.

------
rmorrison
Cool site. If you want a laugh, check out RMS's:
<http://richard.stallman.usesthis.com>

~~~
giu
pg presented his setup, too: <http://paul.graham.usesthis.com/>

~~~
johns
Re-reading that makes me think pg is thrilled about his iPad (which I'm
assuming he bought)

~~~
borism
I bet he isn't thrilled about iPad - can't connect it to HD screen and he
wasn't such a big fan of iPhone OS either.

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jodrellblank
David HH's lamborghini

[http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/11/coyotes-pulitzer-
an...](http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/11/coyotes-pulitzer-and-dhhs-
lamborghini.html)

~~~
mixmax
I went to a DHH talk in Copenhagen when he left Denmark for the US. One of his
major stated reasons was the insane Danish car tax (180%). He would probably
not have been able to afford it had he stayed behind :-)

~~~
stretchwithme
That explains the robust Danish automobile industry.

------
edw519
I really admire dhh and what he's done. His talk at SUS '08 was phenomenal. We
had a chance to chat and he seems like a cool guy. He's one of my many sources
of inspiration.

That being said, who cares what _anyone's_ setup is? It's not like, "Set up
like this guy and you will perform like this guy." There is about zero
correlation between setup and performance. A better post would be, "What dhh
does and why he does it."

As for me, I have a single monitor with 2 sessions, one with lime green code
on a black background in textpad and the other a test session in a browser.
Both are full screen. Alt-tab is my friend. I prefer an underpowered box. If I
can make it work there, I can make it work anywhere.

Is this the secret to my success? Of course not. Put 10 programmers in a room
and get 11 different setups.

Use whatever setup works best for you. If you want to find out what makes
someone else successful, dig a little below the surface for the wisdom waiting
to be extracted by those not so obsessed with the superficial.

~~~
ulf
I think the point of the site is not really to imitate someone's setup. It
rather serves as a kind of anecdote at best, and in some cases (like RMS)
gives interesting insight.

"As for me, I have a single monitor with 2 sessions, one with lime green code
on a black background in textpad and the other a test session in a browser.
Both are full screen. Alt-tab is my friend. I prefer an underpowered box. If I
can make it work there, I can make it work anywhere."

That too, is be kind of interesting to read, especially the ending. I will not
go on and imitate your setup now, since i got my own, but the underpowered-box
stuff is good enough to remember.

------
tippy
Cool site! I wonder what stuff are most popular among these brilliant guys so
i # curl "<http://www.usesthis.com/> | egrep -o "http:\/\/.
_\\.usesthis\\.com" | xargs curl | egrep -o " >[^<]+<\/a>" | sed -e
"s/>\\(._\\)<\/a>/\1/g" | sort | uniq -c | sort -nbr | less

    
    
         20 MacBook Pro
         20 Firefox
         18 Safari
         16 iTunes
         15 iPhone
         14 Mac Pro
         13 Tweetie
         13 Mail
         12 TextMate
         10 Twitterrific
         10 Photoshop
         10 iChat
         10 iCal
         10 Gmail
         10 Dropbox
          9 Twitter
          9 Time Machine
          9 Terminal
          9 MacBook
          9 Google Reader
          8 Xcode
          8 Things
          8 iMac
          7 Quicksilver
          7 NetNewsWire
          7 LaunchBar
          7 Flickr
          7 Coda
          7 Adium
          6 Transmit
          6 Instapaper
          6 Illustrator
          6 Google Chrome
          6 Evernote

------
ananthrk
And it has _why's as well (including a photo of him??)

<http://why.usesthis.com/>

~~~
mdg
_reads link_

Wait - what?!

~~~
ananthrk
Check the date (Feb 2009)

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anurag
In addition to learning about their setup, it's great to put a face to so many
interesting online names. Thanks for putting this together waferbaby. Direct
link: <http://usesthis.com/>

------
rmoriz
DHH in California? what's going on there?

~~~
staunch
Living it up in Malibu, like Iron Man.

------
n8agrin
The one thing I'm surprised about is the external SSD for the 27" iMac. I
can't see how it would be faster running the whole system through the Firewire
bus. Here are some throughput benchmarks of SSD drives I found from OWC (a
well known Mac accessory online retailer):

7200 rpm external drive:

eSATA -
[http://eshop.macsales.com/images/Items/OWCMEQM7500GB16/HIT0A...](http://eshop.macsales.com/images/Items/OWCMEQM7500GB16/HIT0A72335/eSATA.png)

FW800 -
[http://eshop.macsales.com/images/Items/OWCMEQM7500GB16/HIT0A...](http://eshop.macsales.com/images/Items/OWCMEQM7500GB16/HIT0A72335/fw800.png)

SSD external drive:

eSATA -
[http://eshop.macsales.com/images/Items/OWCMEQMSSD050/eSATA.p...](http://eshop.macsales.com/images/Items/OWCMEQMSSD050/eSATA.png)

FW800 -
[http://eshop.macsales.com/images/Items/OWCMEQMSSD050/fw800.p...](http://eshop.macsales.com/images/Items/OWCMEQMSSD050/fw800.png)

Summary: Via eSATA, the 7200rpm drive tops out around 100MB/sec while the SSD
drive hits > 200MB/sec. Via FW800 both drives only max out around 80MB/sec
which is the approximate upper limit of FW800 I believe.

DHH, if you're reading perhaps you can provide a more subjective take on the
real-world performance? I'm curious as I have a 27" iMac and would love to be
able to get the SSD speed boost without taking off the glass and voiding
warranties.

~~~
dhh
The main speed benefit of SSDs is not throughput, but random access speeds.
That's what makes it feel so magically fast. SSD over FW800 still gives you
that.

~~~
orangecat
Very interesting. I've considered putting an SSD in my Mac mini, but opening
them is a pain and I was under the vague impression that latency would suffer
over Firewire. Glad to hear it works well, what enclosure are you using?

------
jpcx01
I second the SSD recommendation. It's a must have on any Macbook Pro.

------
dzlobin
Spoiler Alert: It's all Mac.

~~~
waferbaby
It's not actually all Mac, fwiw. I try to find interesting people more than
interesting setups, and this is what they tend to use. :)

~~~
julio_the_squid
I was surprised to see the woman that works for Microsoft Research talking
about her iPhone, Mac and so on. Or is that not surprising?

~~~
petercooper
Not _too_ surprising: [http://www.macrumors.com/2010/03/15/10-of-microsoft-
employee...](http://www.macrumors.com/2010/03/15/10-of-microsoft-employees-
using-iphones/)

------
dylanz
That was short and sweet. I had never heard of the SnapSnap... it looks
fantastic. It definitely has a better positive/negative review ratio than most
products I've ever checked out on Amazon.

------
bvi
Totally off-topic: What font is that?

~~~
acangiano
Droid sans. Don't you have Firebug installed?

~~~
telemachos
Following the links to the CSS stylesheets works well, too:
[http://david.heinemeier.hansson.usesthis.com/stylesheets/scr...](http://david.heinemeier.hansson.usesthis.com/stylesheets/screen.css)

