Software Celebrities

Who are you, and what do you do? I’m Ashley Davis, a freelance cartoonist and webcomic artist! My work has been featured in dozens of books, gallery shows and pieces of merchandise. I even do a little acting and animating! My webcomic, Jailbird, has been running since July 2012. What hardware do you use? Most of my work revolves around a PC that I built myself a few years back. Every so often, I’ll just put in some new parts here and there; as of now it’s got an AMD Phenom II X4 processor (just recently unlocked its fourth core for some free extra power), 8GB RAM, an a graphics card not worth mentioning by name because it’s a few years overdue for an upgrade. It’s not the most powerful machine, but it suits my simple needs pretty well! I have a dual monitor setup with a 23 inch Samsung LED and a Cintiq 12WX. All of this rests on a standing desk that I cobbled together to try to make my job a little healthier (it has!). When I need to write scripts on the go, I use my iPad 3. And if it counts as hardware, I’ll use pretty much any paper I can get my hands on and a pen to do my sketching and comic thumbnailing. And what software? After a concept sketch is done, I usually go to Corel Painter X to do all of my inking and coloring. Sometimes I’ll go to Flash CS3 for inks (especially if I’m doing a shirt design), Photoshop CS3 for color correction (Painter doesn’t deal with CMYK very well), and a really old version of Jasc Animation Shop for pixel art, but for me, nothing beats Painter’s brushes! For writing, I use combinations of OpenOffice.org Writer and Notepad. Again, nothing fancy! Recently, I’ve been using a program called Workrave to help me time work breaks, which has helped me a lot with staying productive! It also gives you stretches to do while on your breaks, which is a great bonus. What would be your dream setup? My current setup is actually pretty close to my dream! All I’d want to add is a better graphics card (and a better PSU so it’ll work), maybe that new Cintiq 13HD, and a comfortable drafting chair for when I need to sit down. Maybe a plusher carpet for my feet when I’m standing too!

In December 2008 — between the election of Barack Obama and his inauguration — the Bush administration decided to give a farewell present to the oil industry by selling off drilling rights on parcels of public land in Utah's pristine redrock area. A 27-year-old environmental activist and University of Utah student named Tim DeChristopher showed up at the auction, was asked if he had come to bid, said that he was, and was given a bidding paddle with the number 70. ... more ...

Who are you, and what do you do? I’m Leigh Alexander, a journalist and critic of video games and their surrounding business and culture. I write about interactive entertainment and social media and the people who create and participate within that space. I’m editor at large at Gamasutra, I’m a columnist in Edge magazine, Kotaku and at Vice’s Creators Project, and I write at Boing Boing and Thought Catalog and anywhere else if I can find the time. What hardware do you use? It’s an entirely unscientific setup. I have two netbooks – an Eee PC that I take to events and an Acer Aspire One that I use for slightly more things. My entire livelihood depends on being able to create and publish text immediately from anywhere, so that’s all I really have the time and energy to care about. But I suppose video game consoles, being essential to my work, count: I have an Xbox 360, a PlayStation 3, a PlayStation 2 and a Vita; a Wii and a 3DS, and I don’t think my iPhone ever leaves my hand for more than a minute. Um, except for yesterday, when it got lost. Luckily someone found it and it got returned! And what software? All I really require is a web browser, a word processor and some kind of image software – that’s Chrome, Word and IrfanView for me. I’ve been offloading more and more of my content creation and storage onto Google Drive; I don’t even generally worry about where I store anything because if it matters whatsoever, it’ll be an attachment in my Gmail archive somewhere. I can’t actually overstate the role Twitter plays in my life - Twitter’s basically taken the role of my web presence. I use it to keep up on and comment on current events in my field, to broadcast the things I write, and to engage with my readers. I’m obsessed with Twitter; sometimes I use it as a giant chat room. I tweet to excess, I think. The pull-and-pop of refreshing the app on my phone is like my rosary. Freelance writing and having a career that basically lives on the Internet can be very isolating, and it keeps me company. What would be your dream setup? Only when you asked me this did I notice it’s been forever since I had a proper PC with proper software licenses, instead of this scrappy little piecemeal stitched-together infrastructure I’ve built for myself that depends on netbooks and mobile stuff and things living forever on the Internet. I wonder if I even remember how to do anything in Photoshop, for example. I grew up so attached to computing that I’d pet a PC tower the way one would a dog, but I find it very alleviating to think of the tech I use as lightweight, and not necessarily disposable, but certainly replaceable, since the important things are tangible. Being a writer online I’ve had to learn to love how the content that’s important to me isn’t this essential, obsessively-protected save file I need to keep on a zip drive, but is fleeting; I can write something in a web backend, hit publish, let it go like a little leaf on a river, and yet it will probably live forever in some incarnation. Even losing my iPhone yesterday, of course I’d have been irritated about the replacement cost if I hadn’t found it, but with the exception maybe of some of my photos, everything that lives on there is still alive, could appear on a new phone. I guess what I’m driving at is I’ve stopped meaningfully desiring hardware anymore; I’ve become indifferent to it. I do wish I could afford some kind of tablet; I love how iOS games can feel so much more intimate, tactile and immersive on an iPad. If I could really have anything I wanted, I’d want, like, a Mac Quadra running System 6 or something so I could play ancient discs full of black-and-white HyperCard stacks. If I lust after anything, it’s the nostalgia of when my relationship to computing and gaming was weighty and tactile and puzzling, black screens winking serenely at me in luminescent green. I would love a working TurboGrafx-16 and an Apple IIe; I miss the particular texture of black, wig

Who are you, and what do you do? I’m Nick Bradbury and I’m a software developer. I started my career as a cartoonist, but switched to programming after random chance proved it kept a roof over my head more reliably than cartoons did. I created HomeSite, TopStyle and FeedDemon for Windows, then switched to Android development a few years ago and created the Android versions of Glassboard and NewsGator Social Sites. What hardware do you use? My main development machine is a 27” iMac with a 21” secondary display. When I travel, I bring along a 15” MacBook Pro. I have a growing collection of Android devices, including the latest Nexus 4 and Nexus 7 (which I love), plus a smattering of older phones running various versions of Android for testing. A while back I bought an incredibly crappy, low-end LG Android 2.2 phone to make sure my software runs well even on slow devices. I also have an iPhone 4S, which I use to keep up with what iOS developers are creating. My closet is full of the skeletal remains of al

Who are you, and what do you do? I am a journalist. I used to be a magazine editor, and now I write about women and politics and culture for New York magazine and about media for the Columbia Journalism Review - and lots of other things for lots of other magazines and websites. I draw pie charts for The Hairpin and speak at conferences and tell stories using GIFs. Last year, I co-founded a magazine called Tomorrow. What hardware do you use? I am deeply dependent on my two-year-old MacBook Pro. Also my iPhone. Every morning, before I even put on my glasses, I check email and Twitter on my phone. Given that I have to hold it about an inch from my nose, this is probably wrecking my already abysmal eyesight. Anyway, to round out the Mac stack, I also have an iPad that, letsbereal, I mostly use to read Instapaper and the occasional e-book. To further the young-urban-creative stereotype, I use two Moleskines: one (side-bound) as more of a personal journal, holding everything from little drawings to lists to long

Who are you, and what do you do? My name is Floor Drees, I’m a Dutchie living and working in Vienna, Austria. I studied Graphic Design in Rotterdam, worked as a Community Manager for about 5 years and now fiddle around with CSS and Rails after I realized in August last year that I miss making ‘stuff’. I’ve organized a Rails Girls event in Rotterdam in January and have another one planned for September this year in The Hague. I’m the co-organizer of the Ruby developer and WordPress user group meetups in Vienna and I’m setting up a Python workshop for aspiring girl coders. What hardware do you use? I own a MacBook Air, an iPhone 4 (with a Dutch plan) and a Galaxy Camera running Android 4.1 (yup, Jellybean!). The latter is my gadget of choice lately. It’s an incredible tool that allows me to share good quality pictures and thoughts from the tech events I (co-)organize with the Interwebs. The flat I share with my boyfriend sports a Raspberry Pi farm and all kinds of blinking Arduino stuff. And what softwar

When I started work on GET LAMP, I had all sorts of wild ideas about the movie itself and the presentation and the packaging. Among some stuff that came to reality was the beautiful mural inside the package: But most crazily, I wanted something included

I’m no longer going to take international orders. This is not a light decision. International orders are half my sales. But I have to do it. So, here’s what’s been happening on the back end for a while: people order one of my documentari

Who are you, and what do you do? I’m Joanne McNeil. I’m a writer and editor. You can read some of my essays here: joannemcneil.com. I also just started a blog called Internet of Dreams. What hardware do you use? I’m writing this on my trusty unibody Ma

Who are you, and what do you do? People call me Cameron, last name Walters. My initials are the genesis of my online identity in many places: cee-dub. Of course, different services have different username requirements, so I end up using @ceedub a lot, to