Ahmad Awais

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AHMAD AWAIS USES

A list of software & hardware products used by Ahmad Awais — as a web dev advocate and an open sourcerer.

Ahmad AwaisAhmad Awais

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Hello, there. It’s Ahmad Awais — I love teaching, developing, and automating things. I’ve seen many developers keep a /uses page to share what they use. Nowadays, it’s almost customary and expected of you to have this page.

I’m like a digital gearhead, constantly tinkering with an array of software and hardware. I get it; people are curious about the tech wizardry behind the curtain. Welcome to my digital den! Here’s the deal: one link, no repeats, pure fun. No broken records, just awesome tech. Dive in!

👨‍🏫 Courses#

Teaching is a genetic bug in me. I can’t help it. I love to share what I know. It also helps that I come from a family of teachers. Both my grandparents and even my parents are teachers. You’ll probably enjoy my teaching style.

📟 Editor & Theme & Font#

💻 Terminal Setup#

📹 Video Hardware#

📹 Video Software#

🎙️ Microphone#

Throughout these years, I have had many different microphones. I currently use all three of these:

My primary mic is the legendary:
Microphone: Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone
Arm: RODE PSA 1 Swivel Mount Studio Mic Boom Arm
XLR: Jet black Cable Matters 2-Pack Premium XLR
USB Audio Interface: Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 (3rd Gen)
Pre-Amp: DBX 286s Microphone Pre-amp Processor
Amp: Cloud Microphones Cloudlifter CL-1 Mic Activator
Mount: Boseen Mic Stand Extension Tube

My secondary mic of choice is:
Microphone: RODE Podcaster USB Dynamic Microphone
Arm: RODE PSA 1 Swivel Mount Studio Mic Boom Arm
Mount: RODE PSM1 Shockmount and Rode WS2 pop shield

Third and Fourth mic (mostly used by my better half):

💻 Laptops#

I spent a decade with Windows, then more than a decade with Mac. I’m very happy with the macOS and don’t plan to return.

Apple MacBook Pro M1 Max 64 GB – Space Gray
M1 Max 10-core CPU, 32-core GPU, and 16-core Neural Engine
16.2-inch Liquid Retina XDR display
64GB unified memory
1TB SSD storage

Old laptops:

Apple MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013) – Silver
2.3GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor (Turbo Boost up to 3.5GHz)
NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M with 2GB of GDDR5
Retina display: 15.4-inch (diagonal) 2880×1800
16GB RAM 1600MHz DDR3L onboard memory
512GB SSD storage

Dell Inspiron 15 5510 15.6 Inch Laptop
Intel Core i7-11390H, 8GB DDR4 RAM, 512GB SSD
NVIDIA GeForce MX450 Graphics, Windows 11 Pro

♟️ Tablets#

🖥️ Monitor#

🎧 Headphones#

I own Sony WH-1000XM3, probably the best noise-canceling headphones on the market since I need ’em. I’ve been traveling thousands of miles lately as a developer advocate. And boy, I love these headphones. They are so good.

I also own Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones 700, which are the most comfortable, but the sound quality is not as great as the Sony ones.

I try to run 3-6 km a day — that’s where my Apple AirPods Pro come in handy. I bought a couple of other brands, but all of these stopped working after a while. However, Apple AirPods work great. You get what you pay for.

Being six feet tall, I oddly manage a good seat only to be seated next to a family with crying babies (for some reason, I can make babies laugh in a minute), which is a distraction from work on a 10+ hour flight. So, a set of noise-cancellation headphones help a lot.

Also, have the old SteelSeries Siberia v2 Full-Size Gaming Headset. I have had multiple headsets from this company, but I like Siberia V3. Here’s the pic, another one, and this one.

🛋️ Desk#

Pic or didn’t happen? Sure here’s what the desk looks like in 2024.

🪑 Chair#

☕️ The Best Coffee Mug#

🖱️ Mouse#

📱 Mobile#

📃 Contracts#

I use HelloSign to get my contracts and love everything about it. Try out the free version if you are skeptical about it.

🖼️ Digital Asset Management#

Image and video handling, CDN, conversion, optimization, and whatnot. All of that is done for me by Cloudinary. Honestly, I can’t recommend it enough. Sign up now and get 10Gb space and 20Gb bandwidth for free →

💸 Invoicing#

I really like how easy it is to use Invoicely. I recommend it to everyone; they even have a nice free version. Use it. Believe me.

📸 Screenshots & Gifs#

2021: I have recently switched to CleanShot Pro for mac, and I’m absolutely blown away by the app experience. It’s phenomenal. As a developer, I’m generally a Power User of apps — but CleanShot has offered me more features than I had asked for. Features like scrolling screenshots, numbered annotations, video editor, and whatnot.

2016: I admire the screenshot, GIF, and small video hosting by My CloudApp — I use it daily. Comes in handy all the time. Update: Over the years, CloudApp has become extraordinarily slow. There were so many breaking updates, and that’s why many of my open-source repos have broken images. Their custom domain setup is not good enough, I have to disable Cloudflare, and their dashboard won’t let me add custom SSL for the custom domain. It made me sad. Hence I’m switching to CleanShot.

🛠 Text Expansion#

🎳 Data and Backup#

🎭 Emoji#

👟 Jogging/Running#

🎒 Social Media Management#

📨 Emails & Newsletters#

I use a combination of Sendy (my favorite email tool), MailChimp, and Intercom for my emails. Inside WordPress, I use Amazon SES to send emails. I’m also using SubStack nowadays. I quite like it.

📝 Copywriting#

is important. English is not my mother tongue, but Grammarly helps me write better. I can’t stress enough how important it is if you blog a lot. I am a premium subscriber.

⏰ Time Management#

Well, time management has never come easy to me. I use the awesome RescueTime app on desktop and mobile to help rescue my time.

🗂 Chrome Extensions

I used to struggle with Google Chrome Tabs management, where I’d open lots and lots of tabs, and losing all the important ones would be hard. Now, after using so many tools/extensions,

🐾 Cleaning My Mac#

I use CleanMyMac X to do what the name says. Well, this software is a real deal, and from time to time, it helps me delete 10Gb – 20Gb worth of junk files. I’ve used it for years and trust the MacPaw 🐾 team.

💠 SetApp | Set for all apps#

Seriously this is the best Mac app that you can buy. It’s like a SaaS subscription where you pay about /month and gets the most up to dated 100+ premium Mac apps. I have like 20 of those installed atm. This, again is built by the MacPaw 🐾 team, which is amazing.

🏪 Domain Names#

I love to buy domain names. There was a time when I had over a thousand domains in my portfolio, and I used to sell and resell those. If you’re just starting, use Dynadot to buy domains (you get them with my link)‚ they always have the best pricing. I also use Cloudflare to host domains, which is excellent.

🎨 Designers/Designs!#

I have always loved and appreciated good design. There are many good designers in the web community, but some are really good. They totally stand out from the crowd. I use the designs from the following designers, who have a beyond impressive design portfolio. I bet you’ll need a thing or two in there — these designers/designs are my goto design shops:

📺 Do you even watch TV, brah?!#

You bet I do. Nowadays, I mostly use a TV with Google Chromecast – 2nd Generation to watch TV seasons.

🍴 ForkLift + Transmit — Best FTP Editors & More#

I have toyed around with many FTP editors on Mac. But the combination of ForkLift + Transmit is unbeatable. Both are different; both have many pros. I recommend these two and use them whenever I need to access my private data dump — or a server with SSH — yes, these FTP editors work with SSH SFTP secure access very well.

🔦 Spotlight Workflows

😎 CSS Scan for Quick Prototyping

Whenever doing a workshop, I sometimes have to quickly prototype a web example to explain a concept to the audience. Often I find myself copying the CSS from dev tools. Well, no more. CSS Scan takes care of that for me. Saves me a lot of time.

🏗️ UX Wireframing#

I often find myself wireframing a free and open-source project’s UX with this excellent tool called Balsamiq — a fantastic tool to help me process my ideas quickly.

📋 Clipboard Management#

Over the years, I have used many clipboard management apps that would help me copy multiple things to paste them later. I’ve recently switched away from Clipy (it was inaccessible) to a new app called Maccy. I love it.

😮 Automatic Organization#

I am one of those people who keep their computer files organized. Yet it’s a chore to clean up the desktop, the download directory — every day. For the last five years, I have been using Hazel App, which automatically organizes files. Set up the rules once, and forget them. For example, every time I take a screenshot, it stays on my desktop for 10secs and then gets moved to a backup folder, where it gets deleted after 30 days. Life savor!

🔗 Generating Short-URLs

I’m a fan of using short and more context-aware links. Some people are not, and that’s completely fine. I use two short domain names for sharing personal links.

🎛 Learning#

I am generally always learning something. I plan to list these things down here, but here is a couple of them you should look at:

🛠 FireFoo#

I often use Firebase and FireStore in different projects. Debugging the database locally is always tricky; that’s where FireFoo, a Powerful GUI Client
for Firebase Firestore, comes in. I just started using it, and it’s pretty fantastic.

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If you have a question about anything mentioned on this page:

→ Tweet them at @MrAhmadAwais.

Disclosure: I get direct benefits from every post and page I put on this blog. Whether that is monetary or the simple joy of helping others, I’m benefiting. You may find affiliate links. That means if you click on that link and purchase a product, I will receive an affiliate commission at no additional cost to you. I must emphasize that the words on this blog are mine and are not influenced by any compensation. I only recommend products or services I use personally and/or believe will add value to my readers.

Founder & CEO at Langbase.com · Ex VP DevRel Rapid · Google Developers Advisory Board (gDAB) founding member. 🧑‍💻 AI/ML/DevTools Angel InvestorAI/ML Advisory Board member San Francisco, DevNetwork

🎩 Award-winning Open Source Engineer & Dev Advocate 🦊 Google Developers Expert Web DevRel 🚀 NASA Mars Ingenuity Helicopter mission code contributor 🏆 8th GitHub Stars Award recipient with 3x GitHub Stars Award (Listed as GitHub's #1 JavaScript trending developer).

🌳 Node.js foundation Community Committee Outreach Lead, Member Linux Foundation, OpenAPI Business Governing Board, and DigitalOcean Navigator. 📟 Teaching thousands of developers Node.js CLI Automation (100 videos · 22 Projects) & VSCode.pro course. Over 142 Million views, 22 yrs Blogging, 56K developers learning, 200+ FOSS.

✌️ Author of various open-source dev-tools and software libraries utilized by millions of developers worldwide WordPress Core Developer 📣 TEDx Speaker with 100+ international talks.

As quoted by: Satya Nadella · CEO of Microsoft — Awais is an awesome example for developers.
🙌 Leading developers and publishing technical content for over a decade 💜 Loves his wife (Maedah) ❯ Read more about Ahmad Awais.

👋… Awais is mostly active on Twitter @MrAhmadAwais