What's In Your Dock, Salma?

Speaker 0: Hi. My name's Salma. I'm a live streamer, software engineer, and developer educator, and this is what's in my dock. Firstly, my devices. I use an Apple M2 MacBook Pro as my main work machine.

I use an iPhone 15 Pro Max, even though I don't update my phone that often, and I've got Apple Watch SE. I also use 4 HomePods to automate my life and home environment around me, and I use a custom PC build for live streaming. As well as writing code, my day to day involves a lot of live streaming and tech content creation. For live streaming on Twitch, I use a custom build PC and you can see all of the components that I built into that on my website. And I also use a lot of hardware peripherals.

I'm fully in the Elgato ecosystem, so I use 2 Elgato KeyLite Airs, a Stream Deck XL, a WaveOne USB mic, a capture card to capture my Mac output to my PC when I'm streaming, and to the Cam Link 4 k. My camera is a Sony Zed V 1, and I use 2 other Logitech webcams for different camera angles that the chat on stream can trigger to view as well. I also recently got an Elgato prompter as well, which I'm using to talk to you right now, and I would highly recommend it. As for the hardware that I use when I write code, I love using my Mistel Barocco split keyboard. It's actually one of the rarer UK ISO layouts, and it's got some cherry milkshake weirdo key caps on it, which I love looking at.

And I set it up with my Apple trackpad in the middle so I'm not moving my shoulders around all the time in the day. And the software I use when I'm live streaming is OBS. I pipe music in using a service called Pretzel Rocks. I use all of the Elgato software for the peripherals, so there's the control center, the Stream Deck software, etcetera, and the Wavelink software. I also use another tool called ATEM.

It connects, Twitch to OBS and allows me to make things happen on my stream via Twitch channel point redemptions without me needing to write any code. But speaking of writing code, I do have a very large custom setup that I wrote in order to power all of the things that happen on my stream. It's a back end in express and node, connects to a front end built in react, even shares a types package if you want to get nerdy. And so everything I do is a combination of things that happen using Atum, my custom Twitch bot, and all of the software around it. And now for the software that I use in my day to day coding.

I try to keep things as simple as possible and not overwhelm myself with tool fatigue. I'm saying that though, but the list I'm gonna read out is pretty, pretty long. However, I use Versus Code as my main coding IDE. I keep it really simple and I have like a custom setup where I hide the sidebars and all the different activity feeds and things, and I just want a blank canvas to be able to code on. I use iTerm2 as my terminal or the inbuilt terminal in Versus Code, and I try to manage as many of my dependency packages as possible on my machine using Homebrew.

So I'll install node and anything else I need via Homebrew. The main browser I use is Arc. I recently converted to Arc last year. It kind of feels like an app rather than a browser, and that's what I like about it. It's built on Chromium.

So if you're familiar with Chrome, it does everything that Chrome does with a few extra little details on top. And I make sure to use, the browsers like Safari and Firefox as well if I'm gonna test out what I'm building. I replaced Spotlight on a Mac with Raycast. I don't think I'm using it to its full potential, but I do have some pretty cool commands that I use to, like, get my clipboard history up if I miss click on command c and v, and that one's really helpful and it's just nice to look at. I currently use rectangle for window management.

I actually recently switched from spectacle to rectangle last year. I'm still getting used to the key binds for rectangle because there are a lot, but I would recommend it. And on the subject of content creation, I found a really cool app that allows you to hide app icons in your Mac top toolbar when you're doing screen recordings for videos, and that's called vanilla. For day to day video editing, I either use ScreenFlow on my personal MacBook or I use Adobe Premiere Pro on my work MacBook. And one bit of software I couldn't live without is Meeting Bar.

Now this sits at the top of my Mac screen toolbar, and it allows me to consolidate events across as many calendars as I need. And I manage 3 calendars in my day to day, and it's really helpful to give me, a quick glance at what's coming up next in my day. Finally, I recently switched from Trello to Notion for task management last year. Since I started using Notion at work, I began to get more familiar with it and how useful it is to have databases of tasks and other things. Like, I use it to manage my newsletter and everything I need to do for Twitch and all the miscellaneous things I need to do in my life.

The music I listen to when I work actually really depends on my mood. Sometimes I like to put lo fi vibes on in the background. When I really need to work through a difficult problem, I actually like to put metal core on and, like, thrash around a little bit. Unfortunately, the new Spotify Daylist has kind of polluted my algorithm because in the morning when I'm lazy and just wanna want to put something on, I'll put the day list on and it's generally lo fi kind of atmospheric kind of stuff, which is great. But now that's all Spotify recommends me.

So they need like a button to say, like, don't include this in my algorithm, please. I think one of the most interesting pieces of hardware that I use, especially for me because I didn't know this was a thing. And when I got it as a thing, I was like, why haven't I ever used this before? And it seems weird, but it is a light bar for my screen. I use the BenQ ScreenBar Halo because they were kind enough to send me one, and now I just couldn't live without it.

It illuminates my space in the dark when, you know, in the UK it's very dark in the winter, isn't it? And, having this screen bar just gives me a little bit more joy in my life. I don't know what it is. It just gives me life, and I always notice if I forget to turn it on. So I like my hobbies to be as non tech based as possible.

And my two main hobbies in my life right now are cross stitch and learning the drums. I first started doing cross stitch a year ago in January 2023, and I'm currently working on my second very big piece and I started learning the drums in September 2023 And I don't need to use any software or tools for my cross stitch, but one of the things that I love using for my drum practice is a piece of software called the amazing Slow Downer. Now this allows you to slow down or speed up music and backing tracks without affecting the quality of the audio. And whilst you can do the same thing with a digital audio workstation tools, such as Pro Tools and Logic and and whatnot, this is a really simple interface to allow you to scroll up and down for the speed of the track, and you can also change the pitch and things. You import music, and you're good to go.

And it works on, desktop and other devices such as iPads and phones. I would highly recommend the amazing Slow Downer if you are learning anything that you can play to a backing track. The thing that's important to me for some reason to keep analog is my weekend to do list. I write all of the chores and random jobs on a scrap piece of paper in the kitchen. I put little check boxes next to each item and I tick them off gradually.

My son and my husband are involved obviously in the weekend to do list as well, so they get to tick things off when they do things and we leave it in the kitchen. Sometimes it's stuck to the chalkboard thing we've got and it's just a nice break from doing everything digitally in the week. And sometimes it's just nice to keep things in your hand and and remember how to write with a pen, you know? So that's the hardware, software, and analog tools that I use to run my life. Find me on the Internet everywhere as white panther.

That's white p 4nth 3r if you use a screen reader. Thanks for joining me, and, I'll see you somewhere.