Who are you, and what do you do?

I maintain Git, a distributed version control system. Linus Torvalds (of Linux fame) started the project in April 2005, which quickly grew and gained many contributors, which I was one of. Linus passed the project to me later in that year, and I've been running the project ever since. We'll have the 10 year anniversary this coming April.

What hardware do you use?

The primary "machine" I use daily for my work lives somewhere in Google datacenters. It's all virtualised and I'm not sure what the actual hardware looks like - all I know is that the instance is assigned 3 recent-model Intel CPU cores with 12GB RAM.

On the end that has a keyboard and display, I use a Samsung XE303C12-A01US 11.6" Chromebook, or more recently a Toshiba CB35-B3340 Chromebook 2. I sometimes use a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (running Ubuntu). I also have Vizio CT15-A5 15.6-In Thin+Light Ultrabook as a backup.

I carry a Nexus 4 phone or a Nexus 5 phone, and keep either a Nexus 7 or a Nexus 9 tablet on the bedside. I also keep a few Nook Simple Touch Glow-light e-Readers for bedtime reading.

To commute, I use a Micro Sprite kick-scooter, as I hate walking and a bicycle is too bulky to get on a bus with.

And what software?

I use Secure Shell SSH client on my Chromebooks to log in to my primary development environment, which runs some version of Ubuntu Linux the IT folks at Google manage for me.

I have a set of long running sessions in screen. In one of whose windows I run emacs, in which I use gnus newsreader, and there I spend most of my day, exchanging emails with the project participants. Since the project I work on is a command-line tool that is primarily implemented in C, I use the usual CLI development tools, e.g. make, gcc, gdb, etc. The documentation is in AsciiDoc. And of course, the history of the source code is kept in Git.

I use GnuCash to keep track of my checking account and credit card usage. This program unfortunately does not natively run on Chromebooks, and that's why I have a Vizio Ultrabook that runs either Ubuntu or Windows. I however recently started to experiment with crouton, which allows me install a chrooted Ubuntu (or other variants of Linux) on a Chromebook and I can use GnuCash there. So far, this set-up seems to be working well enough for me, so I may be able to lose the Vizio someday.

I use Calibre to manage my e-books, installing them to and removing them from my Nook e-Readers. I haven't experimented with this in the crouton environment yet, though. When I don't have my Nook with me, I use either Google Play Books (on Android) or Google Play Books (on Chromebook or other laptops) for my reading.

What would be your dream setup?

I am good with what I use right now. I used to be picky about CPU performance, thermals, DRAM timings and all that, and I used to build my own boxes by picking the boards and parts, but over time I learned that good enough is good enough.