What's In Your Dock, Cassidy?

Speaker 0: Hi. My name is Cassidy and I'm a software engineer, advisor, developer advocate, investor, and mimer on the Internet and this is what's in my doc. So firstly, for my devices, I use a custom built Windows PC where I hodgepodge together all of the different parts as time goes on. A 2021 MacBook Pro and a 2018 iPad Pro. My day to day involves a lot of coding, meetings, and general writing.

For coding, I use Versus Code. I do also use Vim but the extensions in Versus Code are so good, I use it for most things. For bookmarks, I use Raindrop. Raindrop is great for saving things I want to read. I get full text search of all the things that I'm saving and I can just save it across all devices.

For task tracking, I use to do meter which is actually an app that I built myself. It's just a to do list but you can pause tasks for later and it has a progress bar. And I like gamifying things and the progress bar is really great. For flow state style work, I really like to use the Suka. It's a really great app that yells at you if you get a little bit off track and it also has flow state music, task tracking and a bunch of other just nice things to keep you accountable.

I also use Dabble Me for journaling, which it just emails you every single day saying how was your day and I can quickly respond. And it's nice to have something that kind of prompts you easily, and then it just saves it for you. And then it also reminds you what you wrote a long time ago. But if there's one tool that I couldn't live without, it's probably Obsidian. It's honestly a glorified markdown editor, but it has so much more than that.

Because beyond just editing markdown files and saving it to your computer, it has a plugin system that's open and I've added so many plugins that it's just nice things where for example, you can add Kanban boards to set up project management. It has a data view where you can query your notes as if it's like an SQL database, but it's just your notes. It has templates where, for example, when I write my newsletter, I can have a newsletter template. Or when I wanna write a blog, I have a blog template. And it just has all of the structure built in.

It has a graph view so you can see how your notes are together. And then you can also backlink between your notes. And so it creates a sort of wiki for all of your notes together. It's a really really powerful piece of software that I truly use every day for most things. For brain storming, I use a tool called Brain Story.

Now full disclosure, it's something that my team built but it's a tool that helps you think through your ideas and get feedback on them. It's not generative AI but it's really great for just talking out a side project, a talk, a blog post, anything that you want to think a little bit more about and get feedback on. I listen to a lot of show tunes. I just love it when people are belting. And I like to think that I can belt with them even though I can't.

But it's really fun to listen to that while I'm coding. It feels powerful. But if I really need to focus, it's much more like spacey lo fi type thing so I don't pay attention to the music. I have a bunch of hardware on my desk. Keyboards are probably the main one that I could talk about where I have a bunch of custom mechanical keyboards.

I have some behind me. I've got a bunch all over the place. And I really love building them and just kind of rotating out which keyboard I use day to day. But besides that I have some speakers when I'm really just playing loud music. I've got a shure mv7 microphone and I have a Sony a61100 as my camera.

I really love laser cutting and kind of crafting making cool things. And I play a lot of guitar as well and really like to arrange some music. And so for laser cutting, I use a tool called Affinity Designer that lets me edit vectors and then put them into a machine. And then I use a tool called the guitar pro for arranging and reading guitar music. I have a notebook with me at all times where I just kind of write and sketch out little ideas where I don't wanna pull out some kind of diagramming software.

And I just wanna say here's where this goes over here and just kind of planning out something a bit more visually. And that is the software, hardware, and analog tools that I use. You can find me on the internet at cassid00, c a s s I d o o on most things, and I look forward to seeing you on the internet. Bye.