What's In Your Dock, Kevin?

Speaker 0: Hi, I'm Kevin. I run the developer relations team here at Directus and this is what's in my doc. Firstly, my devices, I'm pretty basic here, I use a 14 inch 2021 MacBook Pro with the M1 Pro Chip and 16 gigs of RAM, and I use an iPhone 14 Pro with 256 gigs of storage because a 128 never seem to be enough for the 2 years that I tend to keep phones. My day to day involves a lot of context switching between content authoring and review, writing documents, meetings, and software development. And to kind of handle that context switching, I use Arc Browser.

There's a good chance that you've heard of this browser by now. It's available on Mac and Windows, but they have a really unique, concept of spaces, which does exist in other browsers, but not quite as well as it works in Arc. So I can set up kind of sections of my browser for different types of tasks that I do or different profiles that I need to keep. And they also have this thing called tab cleanup. So every, you know, every 7 days is what I've got it configured to.

Anything in a particular section screenshots and small video. I find their annotation tool just really, really good, and they also, immediately save screenshots to your clipboard, which is useful, and they keep a history of things that you've captured for a little while. They also have this nice feature where you can take a screenshot and then pin it above everything else. So if I just need a little bit of reference while I go do something else, I'll often screenshot something, pin it to my monitor, and then I can move around and it just kinda stays put there. So really, really useful.

Rewind is a tool that I use to enhance my memory for things that I've seen or said on my machine. It basically watches everything you do, compresses what you do as screenshots really small, keeps them on device, and then at any time, I can pull up this little interface something I may have said in a meeting because it provides transcriptions or something I've seen in a document somewhere, and it will show you when and where you saw it and which application. And then applications it's aware of, you can do, like, a one click open, which is really good. I'm sure we've all had that thing where we go, where was that? Was it a Google Doc?

Was it a Notion? Was it inside of Directus? Was it in a Google Sheet? Who knows? But I know what was said.

I know the words that were in there, so really useful. I love Rewind. I have it has just enhanced my memory so so much. I'm a big fan of cloud development environments because I have to context switch so much. It's good to have fresh code environment when I'm working on specific issues or reviewing specific pull requests.

So for that, I use GitHub Codespaces. I previously used Gitpod, but the really tight integration with the GitHub workflow that Codespaces provides, caused me to to move over there. So from an issue, I can immediately create a new code environment. It installs all my dependencies, and I can get straight to work. It's really, really good for reviewing other people's work as well.

For doing basic recording and editing of my screen, I use ScreenFlow. It's a macOS video editor. I just find that it works really nicely. It doesn't have the most features, but it has basically everything I need day to day. Some really innovative, like, keyboard shortcuts or rather, I should say, intuitive keyboard shortcuts, and it just allows me to get moving really quickly.

Now if I'm recording with multiple people, I use Riverside, which is a browser based studio where you can invite multiple people in. It will do a really nice thing where it will stream to participants a lower quality version of the video than perhaps it needs to, but it will record a full quality version and then stream upload that to the Riverside like storage. So you can always know that you have the highest quality version of someone's recording that you possibly can. We use this extensively to create Directus TV series. For personal task management software, I use Todoist.

I've tried every one of these tools under the under the sun, and I always seem to fall back to using Todoist. I really like the fact that you can use little shortcuts like the hash key to tag something with a project or an at key to do a label and so on and so forth. It does intelligent date recognition, so it automatically tags things with due date. I have app. They also have good browser integrations and general integrations with other tools that I use.

A little utility tool that I use is called Hyperkey. Hyperkey just constantly runs in the background of my Mac, and it remaps my command, alt, control, and shift keys to my caps lock key. And then I no longer have a caps lock key, but what I now have is a hyperkey, so I can hold that and I can now have new keyboard shortcuts using the caps lock key. So I'll do things like, you know, caps t to bring up a translator or caps e to bring up an emoji picker and so on. And there's a really, really high chance that the hyper plus character key doesn't conflict with anything that already exists.

So it gives me just a complete new layer of keyboard shortcuts to create. For day to day project management at work, we use GitHub, actually. We do everything in the open. So I mostly use a road map view, which will show here while I'm talking. And this shows every kind of inbound issue that someone has created, whether that's me, whether that's one of the core directors team or a community member.

We learn a bit more about it to understand the scope of work. We then put it in the backlog when it's ready to be worked on. We put it in ready, and then we kind of track the life cycle of an issue accordingly. So we do all of this. It's in the open, and it's not bad at all.

It lacks some depth of other project management tools, but the fact that our code and our issues and our road map and our workflow are just completely collocated is great. And then throw on top of that the fact that I use Git upgrade spaces, and it just works really nicely. If there is one tool I could not live without, it's Raycast. It is the ultimate productivity tool that kind of gobbles up so many other utilities I once had. At its core, it's a launcher.

So the same way that you may have spotlight search where you hit command space and it brings up a little search bar, I've replaced that search bar with Raycast. It works very similarly. I can launch applications. I can search files, but it also does things like window management, clipboard history, snippets, camera preview. They have a really good store, which is vibrant and new, you know, new extensions are always being published on the store.

It's just really, really good. You can create your own extensions with JavaScript. You can just run bash scripts if you want, and I just use it all the time. It's probably the first thing I install on a new machine when I have a fresh OS, so that's Raycast. I would say it depends on the kind of work I'm doing.

Sometimes I can put on music with words, sometimes I can't. Like most other episodes, I anticipate lofi hip hop is, you know, has has been mentioned before. I listen to lofi hip hop without words. When I'm doing work where words aren't too distracting, it can be anything, musicals, metal, country, pop music, electronic music. Because my German comprehension isn't quite good enough that I find the words distracting.

But, yeah, really, it's eclectic. And just depending on my mood and the amount of focus I need to have sometimes with or without words, that's really the only differentiator. The genre is pretty, pretty eclectic. I would say the only interesting piece of hardware I have is probably my monitor. I use the Samsung Odyssey Ultra Wide 49 inch, so it's a huge widescreen monitor.

And then using Raycast, I have keyboard shortcuts, so I can put applications in thirds, I can put applications in quarters. I can put applications in half. And then for things like video editing, I can obviously full screen an application using keyboard shortcuts. Typically, I'll have 3 things open at a time, a code editor in the middle, reference on the left, and a preview on the right. But, yeah, it depends on the task.

This also is kind of weird. It's a it's a curved monitor. And so when I'm using max spaces and I'm, like, swiping to move between them, it's like the entire pane shifts around, and I'm surrounded by all of these spaces that I can't see. It's kind of it's kind of weird to explain, but, yeah, I think my monitor is probably my only interesting hardware. Right here, just out of view, I've got the Elgato Wave 1 Mic in the Elgato Low Profile Arm, which is an amazing mic arm.

I'm really really enjoying it. It's very very solid. For my camera, I'm actually using my last phone, which was an iPhone 12 Mini mounted and permanently plugged in for power, and that is a continuity camera. So I use the, you know, the built in, integration with macOS and iOS to use that. I have a couple of key lights up here which are on that light me properly, which I actually forgot to put on for this recording, so this isn't the this isn't it in its full glory.

I've got some home kit enabled lights behind me, and then for my keyboard, I use a NuPhy s 60. And instead of a mouse, I use a magic trackpad, so I can still use all of the macOS gestures I'm used to. So I use Todoist, as I mentioned, to kind of project manage things that only relate to me. But often, you need just a little kind of micro to do list, just for something you're doing in the moment. And for that, I use these Titulo cards.

They say Titulo up there in the right, and they're these really nice high stock cards, that just have a little column in the side for you to, you know, provide an icon, tick them off. Say, I've moved this to tomorrow and so on. They're double sided, and I keep one of these in my desk, visible kind of stood up all the time, in case I just need a temporary kind of physical to do list instead of messing around with software tools. But other than that, I really don't do that much analog. I am on my phone constantly.

So as long as things sync well between my machine and my phone, I don't really feel the need to keep much analog. And that's all the software, hardware, and analog tools I use to run my life. I hope you found this interesting. I hope you found this series, what's in your doc, interesting. I hope you enjoy all this other content we have available for you on directors TV, and until the next show, see you next time.