Because exactly no single human being has asked, I have provided my setup I use to develop my sites. This is just my hardware for web development I do in my consultant work. These are not any endorsement of any products, services, pieces of software, etc. It’s just what I use and I think it’s a good development rig.
Hardware
I can build my own PCs but I opted to have the guys at ENU, Inc. build my computer. ENU is based in Portland, OR and I’ve come here for over a decade to buy parts. Since I finally decided to just get a completely new box, I figured it would be worth it to just pay the extra $20 to get a year warranty and let them do the work. This is roughly what I have. Some links go out to other sites because ENU may not sell these parts anymore. I did build this a year ago and they like to keep up to date.
- Processor – A six core AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Processor. Me like good.
- RAM – 8 GB, upgradable to 16 GB if I choose but I haven’t had a need for it yet.
- Video Card – GeForce GTS 450/PCIe/SSE2. Yes, I could have gotten something better but back then, rendering in Blender didn’t use the GPU at all unless you were playing around with polygons in the program. Of course, they have since introduced the Cycles rendering engine so now GPU matters. I probably won’t upgrade the video card before I upgrade the RAM, though.
- Case – Elite 430 Cooler Master. It’s big, inexpensive and glows blue. I like it.
- Hard Drives – WD 500G 64M 7200 SATA II RE4 Enterprise, because it was cheap, fast and had a decent cache. Also in the box, a very old other drive with 250 G of storage that contained a bunch of old files. Some day I will upgrade to solid state drives for the speed increase. For now, this worked for my budget. My hard drives aren’t even close to full. I store my music on the cloud.
- Power Supply – 550 watts. Works good. If I ever upgrade the video card, this is getting bumped to at least 700.
- Monitors – An ASUS… geez. This monitor is good but ASUS loves to put the model numbers underneath the power cord, don’t they? I guess they don’t get a plug, then. It’s a 22″ widescreen and it’s great. For a secondary monitor, I am using an HP S2031, which was on sale at the time for $89. It’s not as bright but it makes a good monitor for coding, while I see the results on the nice big and bright ASUS.
- Sound – Onboard… something. Do they sell sound cards? I don’t do anything high-end. I use the motherboard’s on-board sound and pipe it out to a JVC UX-N1 that I bought for $49.99 about 5 years ago on Woot.com. I bought it as an MP3 player for work because they forbade us from using MP3s on work hardware, then when I got an iPhone I just brought this home and set it up in the kitchen so I can listen to music while I cook. Now it’s in my home office. I took off the little sucky speakers and replaced those with a set of Polk Audio bookshelf speakers that I bought at Best Buy for $99.99.
- Scanner – HP Scanjet G3110.
- Peripherals – a plain Jane Logitech USB Optical Mouse and a holdover from my World of Warcraft days, a Logitech G15 keyboard. This thing is backlit with LEDs so you can type in the dark and it has 18 x 3 programmable macros that you can unleash at the touch of a button. I used to do silly stuff with my WoW characters, like program in a sequence for heals during raids (“/raid A %spell_name spell coming up for %target, my favorite %gender %race %class!” or something like that). I should probably do macros for repetitive tasks someday.
This all cost me about $1300 last year. This year, a similarly appointed computer is sitting in the dumpster behind an office building just waiting for you to go pick it up free of charge. It works great, so go for it!
Operating System
My operating system of choice? Ubuntu all the way. I am not anti-Microsoft; I loved my XBox 360 and the first server-side web stuff I did was in ASP. I just don’t like paying for things that I don’t need to pay for. I get plenty of Windows experience at work, anyway. I am also not totally pro-Apple, even though I do own an iPhone 4 and I love it like Gollum loves his precious. OSX is gorgeous but I simply can’t see paying that much for hardware. Perhaps some day I will build a nice little Hackintosh for a small fraction of the price of a MacBook Pro.
But I do love my little Ubuntu OS. It’s easy to install (FREE!!!!!) development software quickly, and many popular and expensive programs for Windows and Mac have open-source analogues. If you do open-source nerd things like develop in Rails or PHP, those nerd things are very well supported. Heaven help you if you are having issues with drivers, though. Rest assured, ten million people had the same issue before you and a little Google-fu will get you up and running in no time, or at least you’ll feel like you’re not alone in your misery.
Software
This is how I roll:
- Graphics
- Raster – GIMP. Screw Photoshop. Too expensive. Have a student buy a copy for you and it’s still hundreds of dollars. Forget that noise. Get GIMP and if you’re any kind of graphic artist, it’s not that big a leap from Photoshop and you can do most of the same things with it. The development in GIMP is community driven and there are dozens if not hundreds of tutorials available online. If you don’t use Ubuntu, they have a Windows version of GIMP as well.
- Vector – Inkscape. Same as above but replace “Photoshop” with “Illustrator” and “GIMP” with “Inkscape.”
- 3D – Blender 3D. Same as above but replace “Illustrator” with “Maya” and “Inkscape” with “Blender 3D.” Sometimes I do projects in Blender and post them here, like this one and this one.
Get it? 🙂
- Web Development
- Coding – gedit. Just plain gedit. If I were using Windows, it would be Notepad++. You use a WYSIWYG editor? You need a WYSIWYG editor? I’m sure there are very nice ones out there. Sometimes I get a little crazy and I just use plain vi to do file editing.
- Version control – At work, I used Subversion and then at home I used nothing but backing up directories once in a while. That’s not entirely efficient, though. Slowly but surely I have made the switch to Git thanks to this. I save stuff on GitHub sometimes.
- File transfer – FileZilla for FTP and SFTP but for Rails, I just git push stuff up to Heroku. So convenient. It’s the way of the future.
- Content Management System – WordPress for PHP, haven’t decided on one for Rails because I’m busy learning it and I need to get my hands filthy with the code before I can start taking shortcuts. I think I know PHP now, so I don’t need to bother with it so much and WordPress is a respectable way to go. Clients like it because they can do a lot with what you’ve provided them and it shaves days off of web development. I’m good enough in PHP that I can write my own (highly personalized) themes and simple plugins in WP. I can also use trickery to make two completely different plugins work with one another. Neat, huh? Hire me.
- Database – I’m partial to MySQL because of its popularity and ease of use. My Rails work uses PostgreSQL but that’s all handled on the back-end by magical Ruby elves and I haven’t really touched it. Most SQL looks the same with except their idiosyncratic functions, anyway. One system’s SUBSTRING() function is another system’s SUBSTR() function. I know Oracle and MS SQL but haven’t had a need to use those on the web yet.
- Everything else – Really just depends on what I’m doing. PHP. Rails. Apache for the web server, or WEBrick for testing/dev of Rails locally. Donuts. I’m technologically agnostic.
So, this is nothing fancy by a long shot but it gets the job done. One thing I haven’t delved into too much is customizing Ubuntu with fun themes. If anyone has any recommendations, I’d love those.