It is back and better than ever (or the same right now): my current development setup! This will get updated periodically as my setup changes and evolves, so keep checking back often.
Development Machine
I carry a 13″ MacBook Pro (Early 2011) with an Intel Core i7 at 2.7Ghz processor, 16 GB of RAM, a 500 GB hard drive and loaded with OS X Lion to round it all out. Fantastic little machine. I hook it up to a 23” Dell ST2310 monitor, Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad and Apple Magic Mouse at home and a 24″ Viewsonic VA2431wm monitor, same keyboard and Apple Magic Trackpad at work (right now the laptop is at home while I test the machine below). I’m still looking for a decent SSD to drop into the machine and a better solution for Time Machine backups.
Fantastic little development machine.
File Server
Our file serving needs at home are pretty small (at the moment), so I run a cobbled-together FreeNAS 8 box with 4 GB of RAM with an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ processor onboard. Currently I run it with three SATA hard drives (one 500 GB drive, one 160 GB drive, and one 80 GB drive), but I will be upping the capacity soon.
It is all in a single ZFS volume (no parity) and split up into the needed datasets for different tasks. So far, so good.
Tablet Device
I used a first-generation 16 GB iPad for a while as my main mobile device, but my wife took control of it and now it stays at home as the living-area computer. I spend a lot of time in Instapaper and Twitterific for iPad (and iPhone and Mac as well).
Cellular Phone
The one device I always have with me is my 16 GB iPhone 4S. It is my ever-present traveling companion and keeps me constantly connected with the people and information I need to keep on top of. It also serves as my music device and camera when I need one. Simply a fantastic device.
Text Editors
1st Choice
Still TextMate. I’ve tried to get into the whole Vim vibe going around the Ruby community at the moment, but I am just wired to continue to use TextMate. Even after all of this time, simply the best.
As an update, TextMate 2.0 Alpha has been released and is under active development. I’m using it as my main editor on both of my machines from this point forward.
2nd Choice
I have to add Vim here. Vim is everywhere and used by every sysadmin that I have ever met (that might be an overstatement, but stick with me). It is small, fast and infinitely customizable to the point of pain. I’m going to learn Vim, just watch me!
3rd Choice
Of course, I have to give a shout out to Xcode as well. I’m getting into it more and more and I hope to dive in, waist deep, in the future. It is something different for me as I’m more accustomed to simple text editors and not full-blown IDEs.