Uses This

Devon Zuegel

Writer, developer

December 08, 2021 in developer, mac, writer

Who are you, and what do you do?

Hello, world! My name is Devon. I'm a writer, of code and words. The thing that matters most to me is unlocking human potential, so I think a lot about incentive design, tools for thought, and cities.

What keeps me busy these days:

• I'm working with Pronomos, a seed stage fund that invests in startup cities.
• I interview computing pioneers for a video series called Tools & Craft.
• I write about incentive design, land use policy, tools for thought, placemaking, and more on this blog.

Previously, in reverse chronological order:

• I founded GitHub Sponsors, a tool for funding open source software. This stemmed from research I did about coordination problems, market design, and anthropology in open source.
• I hosted a show for a16z about crypto, and I built identity attestation protocols on the blockchain at Bloom.
• I was a software engineer on the Identity team at Affirm.
• In college, I was Editor in Chief at The Stanford Review.

In my free time I read weird blogs, build side projects, take public transit, and ride my bike. I love reasoning about, improving, and designing systems and infrastructure.

What hardware do you use?

• MacBook Pro (16")
• Second monitor
• HP OfficeJet Pro 8030 series - It's important to put things you're thinking about on your walls! I can't say I recommend this particular printer though
• Blue Yeti microphone for podcasts
• A globe that sits on my desk, which I refer to more often than you might expect
• Treadmill for under-desk gives me a few thousand extra steps per day

And what software?

Oh dear, so much. I'm probably going to miss a few, but here goes:

• Logseq for thinking
• Evernote for quick-access + archiving articles I've read
• Notion for a shared workspace with other people
• Planta for caring for my plants
• iCalendar, but not quite how you'd expect
• Postach.io for publishing my blog from Evernote
• VSCode as my primary text editor
• Anki for memorizing things I want at my mental fingertips
• SelfControl for blocking websites I want to avoid for a period of time
• Gather.town for hosting online events in a way that's more fun than Zoom
• Zencastr for recording podcasts
• Google Sheets for quickly analyzing data + creating graphs
• Figma for all sorts of things
• Mailspring for email
• Pocket Casts for podcasts
• Lupa for practicing Spanish
• Intelligent Translator as a menu bar app for translation
• iStat Menus for menu bar widgets like weather, laptop temperature, CPU usage, etc
• Alfred as an application launcher and general productivity tool
• Text expansions to make my typing faster (e.g. "d@" expands to "[email protected]")
• Blender for 3D modeling (though I'm not very good at it yet)
• Otter.ai so I can record voice notes which I transcribe into essays later
• Screenotate for making screenshots more useful
• Typescript and Clojure as my primary programming languages, though I used to do a code lots Ruby and Python in the past too

What would be your dream setup?

I wish I could have everything laid out on surfaces all around my space, like you can with physical objects. It bums me out that everything is constrained to my computer screen. I want to think more spatially, but computers don't lend themselves to that very well.

One step towards that would be for my entire wall to be a high-resolution screen that is on all of the time, and then I can just throw stuff on there for later and come back to it when I walk up to it. Even that is more limiting than I'd like, but it'd be a step forward.

I also wish that all the different places I take notes and clip articles were more connected. I use different tools for different types of tasks, but it's too bad that comes with the tradeoff that those things are then siloed from each other.

Uses This is supported by ZSA, makers of the Moonlander, ErgoDox EZ and Planck EZ keyboards. They also publish an awesome newsletter.