I built this little beast to handle both gaming and development. With the SSD it's super fast and handles everything I need.
Windows
At work we use Windows, so I use Windows for my custom build as well to handle remote connections and being generally comfortable with the environment. Otherwise, I prefer to develop on my Linux build or my 13" Macbook Air.
WASD 87-Key Mechanical Keyboard ->
Mechanical keyboards are so fun to type on! I have the super loud Cherry MX blue switches ;). In hindsight I probably should have went with one a little more subdued like clear.
The best mouse I've ever used. It's big enough for my hands, which is frustratingly difficult to find. Also has customizable RGB and programmable DPI if you're into that sort of stuff.
VS Code has been my go-to IDE for about three years already. For me it has the perfect balance of features and speed to work exactly how I want it to. Sometimes I'll revisit Sublime Text, but it just isn't the same.
I love this theme so much that I let it inspire the look of my entire website!
Also featured here on the website! JetBrains came out with this font recently and its simplicity is nice to look at for extended periods. I might be a weirdo, but I use "ExtraBold" in VS Code.
There was definitely a bit of a learning curve when switching from Chrome to Firefox, but now that I have adjusted I don't regret doing it. Working with CSS in the dev tools has more useful features than Chrome last I checked as well.
It's fast, easy, and I haven't seen a reason I'd need to switch as of yet.
On Windows it was harder to find a nice application for interacting with relational databases. This is the most stable one I've interacted with so far. I use MySQL Workbench at work and I hate it.
C'mon, it's Github.
Digital Ocean has great documentation on doing anything you want to do. The dashboard is clean and simple to work in. I'm glad I chose it because I have nothing but good experiences with it.
I recently started using this to handle analytics on my websites since before I wasn't using anything and I just wanted to know how much traffic the site was getting, especially to the blog. Also, I'm against the over-collection of user data, so that's a bonus.
I'm considering giving Figma a try, but Adobe XD is a solid application where I can quickly get a mockup of a design on the screen. I've gotten comfortable with it, although there are plenty of features I wish it had. I don't know if other applications meet those needs either, though.
I like pixel art and wish I was good enough to incorporate some of it into my projects. I think this application has been abandoned for the most part as far as support, and it isn't open-source where a community can take over, unfortunately. Hopefully that changes because the bones are solid.
I drop a lot of the resources I like to go back to in my library so that I can share my collection with others.
If you're curious about anything I'm forgetting, send me an email at cwinter.web@gmail.com and I'll get back to you and maybe add it to the page!