As well as using mostly open-source and free software, anacubist decided to use preloved hardware and furniture. Has it worked and are we happy about it?

There have been no issues with buying preloved hardware. TradeMe has been the main source of finding people selling their hardware. I usually check prices for a week or so to see prices before starting to bid. My advice, always have a maximum price and do not sweat it if you get beaten by a few dollars.

Here is a rundown of stuff around the office.

The iMac I'm writing this on was a previous rental machine and is in close to perfect condition. It is an older model, but with software patches it runs Catalina. I added a few sticks of extra RAM (again preloved) to get it to 20GB. It came with Apple keyboard and magic mouse. It is a spinning hard drive, but fast enough.

It has a nice 27-inch screen, and I added a secondary 24-inch full HD screen, I was given by a previous employer.

A Mac mini 2010 has a minimal iOS development environment on it. It may go, as it's intended use has gone. The DVD drive was replaced by an extra hard drive. I use Screen Sharing to connect to it, when needed.

When I need to be mobile, I have a low specification MacBook Air. It is the oldest model which can run Big Sur. It is powerful enough to use Visual Studio Code to edit JavaScript and test Node based stuff. Also handy for taking into town on the train etc.

There is an 3TB Time Capsule on top of a bookshelf, which backs up the 3 Apple devices.

All Apple devices were bought and then upgraded using TradeMe.

I use an iPhone 6s which I have used since it was released. (Thanks for letting me keep it! You know who you are.) When it gets dropped from the iOS support, I'll look for a reasonably priced, second edition iPhone SE. I like the form factor. When possible, I use real hardware when developing and testing.

We also have a few Windows machines in the network. They all allow Remote Desktop for screen display. There are two laptops and a Lenovo ThinkCentre M73. The ThinkCentre has a few Docker instances for local testing. One laptop is a HP Elite Folio 9470m. I bought it from US eBay several years ago. The other is a Lenovo ThinkPad E590, which Lenovo were selling off in a sale. All three machines have 16 GB RAM and SSD drives and additional hard drives.

Networking is handled by a small D-Link gigabit switch plugged into the fibre to the house. Everything which can, uses a cable. Much better than WIFI. The time capsule provides office wireless for mobiles etc.

We decided to get a new printer as it was 50% off. Color LaserJet Pro, scanner etc. Sits on the network.

I'm a keyboard and pointing device snob. I use the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard and a Logitech MX Ergo trackball. There is an Apple keyboard and mouse attached too.

Office desks were bought just after first COVID-19 lockdown. Office chair was from local person here in Upper Hutt.

Music is provided by an Amazon Dot Echo I was given as a gift and Apple Music.

There is also a HP blade enclosure filled with sixteen blades, totalling thirty-two computers and 1.5 TB RAM. It sounds like a jet engine when powered up. A TradeMe deal costing less than a new Logitech MX Ergo trackball. That is a story for another time.

One of the ideas with anacubist was to create products using open source and free resources. We start small and take advantage of the free tiers offered by many services.

The main site is created using Notus UI kit which uses Next.js, Tailwind CSS, and React. The toolkit is MIT licensed. The anacubist site is stored on GitHub. As commits get merged to 'main' the site is built and deployed to Vercel as static pages. This done with a Vercel application in GitHub. All hands off. Vercel will build branches when they are committed. The Vercel build pipeline is straight out of the box.

Development has been done on an iMac. (I have one and the screen is nice.) Many programming tools have OSX versions. If they are command line tools, then OSX will run them anyway. I use oh-my-zsh in an iTerm2 window, with powerline fonts to give glyphs and shapes in the prompt. I use a few shell plugins in that.

Local testing is done using the npm tools which came with the UI kit. The pages are made with a set of React components, composed of existing controls and styles from that took kit. Icon images come from Fontawesome and the photos come from unsplash. I like unsplash, as the photos are excellent, and they have auto sizing and cropping on the url. Using the url updates the image producer's counts.

I use Visual Studio Code and a few plugins when developing any Javascript or TypeScript coding. Nice editor and it keeps getting better.

With any front end there is a bit of back end. The back end is ridiculously small. There is one Azure function, which calls SendGrid to send an email to me and one to the user contacting us. The email is put together in the function, but that will be changed to use SendGrid templates and letting them handle the merge.

The Azure function is in an Azure DevOps git repo. A build pipeline builds and deploys the function. The pipeline is from the default pipeline list. So easy! The function is written in C# using Visual Studio for Mac and tested in the debugger using Postman to post requests. I could use VS Code in the future or even Rider.

This blog is also using Next.js and hosted on Vercel. The content is stored in Prismic. As content is updated there the blog site gets refreshed. The blog could have been done using any number of options, but a CMS seemed sensible.

Route53 on AWS handles DNS. I have a project using AWS services, so stayed with that. That points subdomains to the appropriate real locations and entries for SendGrid, Microsoft 365 etc. Many services now give detailed information for the required DNS entries. That makes it much easier.

Visit attribution for a full list of the tools and libraries we have used during the creation of the site or the business.

anacubist

What do we use for hardware?

Libraries, tools, and services, oh my.