What tech do you use?

Read on friend to learn about the hardware and software I use for play and to build Made Mistakes. None of it is terribly exciting or unexpected, but hey — maybe the curious of you will find it interesting.

Hardware

• iMac 21.5-inch, Late 2013 model with 16GB memory, and stock Apple Magic Mouse and keyboard.
• iPad 12.9″ Pro with the Space Gray finish and Apple Pencil (first generation).
• iPhone 13 Pro with Graphite finish.
• Apple Watch Series 5 with Space Gray aluminum case.
• Canon Rebel XTi DSLR Camera with EF-S 18-55mm and 50mm lenses.

Design and development

• Operating systems: macOS Catalina and Windows 10

• Visual Studio Code with the following notable extensions:

  1. Material Theme Kit
  2. GitLens
  3. Write Good Linter
  4. Insert Date String
  5. Lorem ipsum
  6. Markdown Preview GitHub Styling
• Sourcetree for Git heavy lifting when VS Code doesn’t cut it.
• Adobe Creative Cloud - Photoshop, Illustrator, and occasionally AfterEffects.
• Jekyll - Ruby based static site generator.
• Gatsby - React based framework for building websites and apps.

I’ve been on a static site generator kick the last couple of years and use Jekyll Gatsby to build this page and everything else found on the site. The basic idea is I write a bunch of text in Markdown and it spits out a set of files that are deployed to a webserver.

This is where I’d link out to my public GitHub repository for this site. But due to a bunch of lazy developers ripping me off and changing the bylines and such I’ve made it private for the time being.

Interested in my previous site designs? Check out my Jekyll themes instead, which are all open source and free for you to use and abuse.

Other software

• BitWarden - password manager.
• Backblaze - cloud backups.

Site stuff

• Gatsby build and deployment via GitHub Actions.
• Hosting and CDN via Netlify.
• Domain name registered with Hover.

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