I don’t just mean a wrench, unless thats it for you. I mean any tool you regularly use for work that you consider your most important. If you’re a software person name whatever digital tool you guys use. Whatever the career everyone uses tools I dont care if they are digital, verbal, physical or psychological. For me its honestly probably a flashlight, before I use any tools I’m always investigating with my flashlight or using a laser to trace lines.
My brian.
My brian.
Any specific Brian or just the one closest to you?
I AM BRIAN!
THE BRIAN
NAMED ITSELF
THE BRIAN
(and he would have gotten away with it, too,
if it hadn’t it been for you meddling kids)
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My glasses, for sure. Next would be my bike, as I use it to get around everywhere. Third most important is probably my keyboard at work, or a pencil.
God damn I didn’t even consider glasses
My table saw. It’s the cheapest one I could buy new, but damn if I don’t use it for every single project I do. Just got much nicer combo blade for it, so now it cuts buttery smooth.
Give me ssh, vi, bash and Linux kernel and I can get work done.
My brain :p
Did you just call yourself a tool?
if you want to put the sense of self in the brain - yeah, why not? :)
A spudger, aka nylon probe tool aka “black stick”. I have them in drawers and toolboxes all over the place. Useful for working tiny plugs out of electronics and pressing, poking and scraping at things.
Caffeine.
I feel naked without my Leatherman multi tool.
Terminal on Linux for work. Bash is such a fun thing :)
IntelliJ IDEA
It’s an IDE, a highly featureful code editor.
A lot of programmers like to use more basic text editors and pile on plugins. I feel bad for them when they share some new plugin they’re excited about and it’s a feature that’s been in IntelliJ forever and they had to put extra work in to get it. And so many other users of that editor don’t even know what’s possible.
My drawing assets. Drawing diagrams to explain things makes my life so much easier
Do you draw digitally or pen and paper? If the latter, do you have specific utensils you like?
I do both but perfer digital because i hate the marks of shame
I do sys admin/engineering work in a Windows environment. PowerShell is what got me this job, and together with my programming experience allows me to keep up with my seniors who have been in their positions for a decade or more.
It also helps us all make a good team. They have the knowledge and experience advantage (though I’m catching up), I have the skills to figure out how to implement/automate the plans in a way that doesn’t involve days of mind numbing manual actions.
PowerShell is absolutely required to admin Windows. You don’t have to be expert level, but you should be able to eventually get a script out that does the job.
Org mode!!!
I don’t say this lightly, I think I would be dead if it wasn’t for Org mode in emacs given how hostile most of the tools and systems in society are to my brain.
It seems like every other organizational/pkm tool is built by people with extremely high executive function, is extremely opinionated in a way that is impossibly unlikely to dovetail with my particular brain and how it specifically needs help and is made with ZERO thought to how cruel it is to design a wholistic organizational and thinking tool and sell it to people who are struggling in precarious positions via a business that will eventually enshittify or abruptly go out of business and leave those people stranded a million miles from shore with a notes/thinking system that is hopelessly locked into an abandoned system.
I use Org mode for work, I use it for life, it is essentially as necessary as a pen and paper for me to actually get shit done.
The browser. A surprising amount of my billable hours is googling the manual of some obscure thing someone else sold our customer and they want to feed the signal to our system and then reading aloud how they connect the thing.
Regularly use for work? Scalpel blades. My job would be essentially impossible without them.
What do you do?
I get every organ or piece of tissue that is removed from you during surgery. I cut up the tissue so it can be made into slides for the pathologist (a type of physician) to render a diagnosis.
How finely do you cut your steak at a restaurant? I’m imagining you cutting very fine slices and savoring them one by one.
Lol!! Believe it or not, I hate cutting my food!
Because…
- I’m lazy
- When you’re used to using ultra sharp knives, things like steak knives feel so incredibly dull that it’s infuriating/“difficult”. At work, I go through scalpel blades like candy. A sharp blade is always key for my work!
