The Brightbox Toolkit 21 Oct 09

It’s been quite interesting to read the recent “Tools of the Trade” meme where people are blogging what they use to do their job. I found it so interesting in fact, that I decided to find out what tools we all use at Brightbox. Here’s our list.

Caius

Hardware

• 15” Macbook Pro (Unibody) with 4GB ram, 7200rpm 320GB HD
• 48GB SSD Expresscard
• 24” Samsung External Monitor

Software

• TextMate – My third arm.
• iTerm – Gives me back cmd-<num> for switching tabs
• Adium / Tweetie / Limechat for communication
• Safari – Eats ram, but I still prefer it to any other mac browsers
• HTTP Client – Graphical curl, great for debugging XML calls
• Markdown – I write everything in it.

George

Hardware

• Thinkpad R500, Core 2 Duo P8600 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM, 250G 5400rpm disk, Windows Vista Home Premium license.
  Running Ubuntu Karmic; was intended to be Jaunty, but there was just too much broken stuff in it for this (quite new) Thinkpad. A great fat heavy breezeblock of a thing, but superb keyboard and display mean it can be used all day and it’s far and away the most powerful computer I’ve ever had.
• Acer Aspire One for emergencies. – Running Ubuntu Netbook Remix. (I’ve blogged about it before). Cute, useful – lovely little machine.
• Draytek Vigor 2820n and emergency backup ZTE 627. – Not that big a step up from the Prism VTX5000.
• Old no-name P4 box and 23” LCD.
  It’s shit but it’s mine. All the other computers are Brightbox’s. Personal email, house fileserver, source of graphs and music, controller of the central heating, footrest.

Software

• Lots and lots of xterms – still the best way to use computers.
• GNU screen.
• Windows XP inside KVM – for those “need IE” moments, chiefly involving Dell DRAC cards or suppliers’ support websites.
• Mozilla Thunderbird – For work email.
• Alpine – For personal email.
• Pidgin IM – I’m indifferent to it, but it works.
• joe – Because I learned WordStar at age 11 on my first PC, from my dad, who knew it and may well have used it before I was born.
• Google Chrome – Intuitive, fast, stable, and pretty. If the Google monopoly will make everything this good then bring it on.
• Google Calendar.

Jeremy

Hardware

• 15” Macbook Pro (Unibody) with 4GB RAM – the best machine I’ve ever owned by far both in terms of reliability and design
• 20” Dell 2005FPW external monitor at the office

Software

• TextEdit – I find myself writing lots of notes in plain txt files
• Yojimbo – collate all sorts of notes, PDFs etc
• Fireworks CS3
  I often use the Mac “common library” objects to quickly mockup forms which works nice. Probably the last Adobe software I’ll ever buy, they have a horrid licensing policy and the software is generally bug ridden. I probably could have built a small city with the money I’ve wasted on Adobe licences over the years
• Safari – not exactly lightening fast, but I’m used to it (I use DeliciousSafari plugin as CMD+D which is nice)
• Adium – nuff said
• Terminal – with Ciarán’s terminal tab switching bundle

John Leach

Hardware

• ThinkPad R61
• Some kind of EeePC for on-call on-the-go
• Bialetti stove-top coffee maker
• Xbox 360

Software

• Debian, Ubuntu.
• Ruby!
• SSH, bash, Capistrano, Puppet.
• Wireshark protocol analyzer – How do people troubleshoot anything without it?
• Strace, gdb – Useful for detecting how much crack a developer has been smoking.
• Emacs for development.
• Vim for config file editing.
• Tomboy for note keeping. I keep a LOT of notes.
• Redmine – It’s what projects crave.
• Guitar Hero

Louisa

Hardware

• Dell XPS M1330 – came pre-installed with Ubuntu and it JustWorks™
  Using Hardy – I prefer stability to the bleeding edge (ie, change scares me).

Software

• I mostly live in Firefox even though I suspect I should be using Google Chrome (see aforementioned comment re: scaredyness)
• I do a lot of admin stuff in OpenOffice but find I’m more productive actually writing stuff in gedit because then I don’t get obsessed with formatting and fonts
• I use a combination of TomBoy and a text file called scratchpad.txt for notes/drafts of stuff in progress
• I use Pidgin for IM/IRC
• I use GIMP and Inkscape a lot for photo-editing & design stuff (although not really that much for Brightbox because Jeremy is so much better at it than I am ;) )
• Talking of not-for-Brightbox design stuff, I use KXStitch for designing stitch charts for (often geeky) craft projects

I prefer a paper desk diary instead of using Google Calendar or to-do list software, but have to use the former to keep up to date with the rest of the team

Rahoul

Hardware

• Macbook Pro 15” Core 2 Duo with 3Gb RAM
  Running Leopard as I’ve not had time to upgrade to Snow Leopard yet
• EeePC 701 for emergencies
  Running Ubuntu Netbook Remix
• MacMini Core Duo
  Running Snow Leopard

Software

• Coda and Textwrangler – Believe it or not, I don’t like Textmate
• Adium and Nambu
• Fluid – To keep my important web-based stuff separate to Safari
• Acorn – Can’t afford Photoshop, don’t want it
• The Hit List, iCal, Spanning Sync and Google Calendar – Productivity ahoy
• Windows Vista inside VMWare, with IETester – Because IE6 still exists

Shared tools

And finally some shared tools that we all use for various things.

• Xero for our accounts
• Highrise to keep track of sales/marketing stuff
• Dropbox for quick’n’easy doc sharing
  (I love how it JustWorks™ on Linux—Louisa)
• Redmine for project management and bug tracking.