My Development Environment
Last month I found something new on Facebook, it’s called Puzzle Master. I don’t know for certain, but Puzzle Master seems to be run by Facebook (the corporation) as a way to find new development talent.
When I first discovered Puzzle Master the running contest was:
To enter the contest, upload to our fan photo album, a screenshot of your desktop and development environment (including as many editors and tools as you can, and your desktop wallpaper) along with a short essay of 250 words or less explaining why and how you use it.
I don’t generally participate in this type of contest but I always find it interesting to see how other developers work. There were some cool prizes available and not many entrants so I decided to upload a screenshot of my desktop.
I was disappointed because the picture was scaled down so much that the apps were indistinguishable. So, I decided that it might be fun to do a few posts on my development environments.
First up… my physical setup!
The picture is a link to flickr where I’ve attached some notes to the image.
- MacPro (2 x 2.66GHz Dual-core Xeon) with 8 GB and ~2.5 TB
- Two 24″ Dell monitors, both at 1920×1200
- Mac OS X 10.5
- VMWare Fusion running XP SP3
This is my home office but my work setup is similar. At work my MacPro is 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-core. It has 12 GB memory and a single 500 GB disk. Maybe I’ll try to update this post later with a picture of my desk at work.
Update:
Here’s my desk at work!
Clay Shirky on the Cognitive Surplus
I really enjoyed this speech. It is a very insightful commentary about web 2.0 and the shift away from passive entertainment (i.e. TV) towards pastimes that require active involvement (e.g. editing Wikipedia, playing WoW, etc.).
I Found Myself in a Dark Wood
Dante, Inferno, Canto I:
In the middle of our life journey I found myself in a dark wood. I had wandered from the straight path. It isn’t easy to talk about it: it was such a thick, wild and rough forest that when I think of it my fear returns…. I can’t offer any good explanation for how I entered it. I was so sleepy at that point that I strayed from the right path.
