The Setup

There are a lot of posts about how someone uses their computer to get the job done. One of my favorite sites that compiles a list of posts like that is The Setup. As I like to keep track of what I use, I’m doing my own The Setup-like post to open this blog.

Who are you, and what do you do?

I’m Douglas Drumond, Android developer at Movile and organizer of GDG Campinas. I blog here about anything and on Roboto Dojo about Android development (in Portuguese). I’ve been working with Android since 2010, except for a brief hiatus when I opened my start up on business intelligence with some partners, although I never lost complete contact with Android. After failing with the start up, I came back to mobile development and now I focus 100% on Android.

What hardware do you use?

I use a Dell Inspiron 14R at home, attached to a LG 22LE6500 television. At work, I use a Mac mini with two LG displays. I use a Galaxy Nexus as my main phone and a Motorola RAZR i that Intel gave me at a NDK course. I use a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 from 2012. I used to read a lot on my old Kindle keyboard while commuting, but since I joined Movile I go by bike and carry no gadgets beside a cell phone, so I don’t read as much as I want. I still have my iPhone 3GS to play Taiko no Tatsujin and Guitar Hero and my first gen iPad to play Taiko no Tatsujin (again) and read Go books.

And what software?

I use Linux since 1999 and abandoned Windows in 2004. In 2008 I bought a Mac and fell in love with OS X. It combines a nice GUI with great underhood OS (it’s a Unix, afterall). This year I bought a Dell laptop and I’m back to Linux at home with Ubuntu 13.10. It feels great.

For Android development, I use Android Studio and I cry in pain every time I need to use Eclipse. When it’s not Android related (sometimes even when it is) I use Vim. I used to provide binaries for MacVim on OS X 10.7 and 10.8, but after my MacBook Air broke, I can’t build for 10.8 anymore. I like vim so much that I’m always thinking in using it for Android development too. Even my browsers are vimified.

And talking about browsers, I browse the web on Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox with Vimium (Chrome) and VimFx (Firefox) extensions. I use Google stuff for almost everything, Gmail, Blog, Drive, Google Apps for your domain, you name it.

GitHub for public repos and Bitbucket for private ones.

When I use a Mac, there a lot of tools I rely on to boost productivity, such as Alfred, PCKeyboardHack, KeyRemap4MacBook and Keyboard Maestro. I use f.lux to save my eyes. Now I’m trying to set up a similar configuration on Linux, still unsuccessful. I used to save my notes on Evernote, but its app is becoming slower and slower, it lacks a native Linux client (there are 3rd party alternatives, but I didn’t like any) and its web counterpart isn’t so nice to use, so I’m looking for alternatives. For now, I’m sticking with it, but I’m experimenting with Google Keep and Simplenote.

Under Linux, I use default terminal, my Mac runs iTerm2. My shell of choice is Zsh.

What would be your dream setup?

I like the idea of Chromebooks. Use a lot of remote stuff and let the companies deal with infrastructure, backups and so on. Log in from another chromebook and everything is there. But it should have same speed as my local PC and great development tools also. I hate configuring things, I’d like to grab another computer, log in and it just works.