Ever since I stumbled upon it back in 2011, I’ve been a big fan of Uses This (nee The Setup), which features short interviews with tech or creative people. Each interview is the same in that they ask the identical four questions:

Who are you and what do you do? What hardware are you using? What software are you using? What would be your dream setup?

It’s in my feed so I never miss an episode. Some of the interviews are with silly people and therefore themselves silly but most are interesting and I very often learn something or get an idea that I can use in my own work.

The most recent interview is with Paul Ford, the CEO of Postlight, whom I’ve written about before. Ford is a thoughtful guy and a good writer so it’s always interesting to read him.

His interview is, I think, the longest I’ve ever seen on Uses This. He gives long detailed answers to the questions as well as explanations of why he made the choices he did. He is, of course, an Emacs/Org user and says that he spends 80 per cent of his life in Emacs.

He’s a CEO but still spends a lot of time on technical issues so he uses and builds a lot of tools. When he’s not in Emacs, he likes to work on the command line where he uses the Z shell and tmux. If you’re looking for some thoughts on a workflow that’s not targeted specifically at someone in engineering, take a look at Ford’s interview. It’s enjoyable and you may get some ideas.