Hi! Tell us about who you are and what you do
Derek Sivers, formerly an entrepreneur and musician, now just a philosophical writer and explorer that loves programming tools for myself on the side.
What is your hardware setup?
Fanless desktop I got from https://www.quietpc.com/ ten years ago.
Some cheap monitor that has a dead ant inside of it, literally, looking at it as I type now. Years ago I thought it was an ant crawling across my screen so I went to swat it away but it was inside the monitor and my swat killed it, so there it is still.
Propped up on a carboard shoebox for better eye level. And all of this is in an old ramshackle house that I’m going to tear down soon.
And what are the favorite items in your workspace?
What is your software setup?
- Vim text editor, all day every day. Even my five books (so far), all written in Vim in the terminal.
- PostgreSQL database
- Ruby programming language
- Ratpoison window manager
- Nginx web server
- OpenBSD operating system
- Firefox browser.
What are your favorite programming or scripting languages?
PostgreSQL’s plpgsql - the built-in functions - are what contain most of my business knowledge. This was inspired by Rich Hickey’s []“simple versus complex”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKtk3HCgTa8) point, so I decided to simplify by keeping the data logic in the database with the data itself.
Outside that, a thin layer of Ruby, but that’s likely to be swapped to any other language some day.
Is there anything you are missing in your setup?
Nah. I tend to not want what I haven’t got.
What book comes to your mind that you would like others to read?
The best book ever written: “How to Live” by Derek Sivers. ☺
But besides that, go to https://sive.rs/book where I keep a constantly-updated list of every book I’ve read since 2007 with detailed notes and my 0-10 recommendation rating. It’s already sorted with my top recommendations up top.
And see https://sive.rs/uses for details on the stuff talked about here.