The Setup / Erick Mendonça / 2013

Who are you, and what do you do?

I am a convicted gamer. I have a lust for code. Besides coding, I really like to write other things. Fiction, mostly. I’m married with a great photographer and we have a little kid who loves Plants vs Zombies. And here we are talking about games again!

What hardware do you use?

I use a Windows laptop most of the time to write code. I use a Windows desktop as a home server. I play games mainly through Steam on Windows PCs. I use a smartphone to browse, mail, message and play on the go.

The laptop is Core i7 LG machine with 6 GB of RAM and a 750 GB HDD. It packs a NVidia Geforce GT 555M video card, powerful enough to play some games, connected via HDMI to a TV, accompanied by a Xbox controller. My desktop is a older machine, a Pentium Dual Core, 4 GB of RAM and a Geforce 9800 GT. Never felt too compelled to upgrade it over the years. The smartphone is a iPhone 4. It is my first and only smartphone until now. It has survived my lack of ability and - more interestingly - survived to my son.

And what software?

I’m very fond with C# and use it in a lot of projects, along with SQL Server databases. Maybe it is that way because most of the dayworks I’ve done to this day used these tecnologies.

I also like and use Java, PHP, Python and Javascript. I’m curious with Ruby and C++ and like to play with them a little. As databases, I’ve used MySQL and PostgreSQL too.

I like to use command-line tools, but don’t feel so agile with them for day-to-day tasks.

• Visual Studio is my main place to go for code. While not working with C#, I mainly use Notepad++.
• Git is my favorite version control tool, but I also use SVN a lot.
• SQL Server Management Studio to manipulate SQL Server databases.
• I’m using OneNote to take notes.
• Wunderlist is my favorite tool to control lists and tasks. Fast and simple.
• Toggl is a simple tool to monitor my time spent coding.
• Steam is my gaming buddy.
• Chrome is the best browser out there. Period.
• I don’t always listen to music while coding, but when I do Windows Media Player (or the iOS Music app) is good enough.

What would be your dream setup?

My dream setup is a PC, not so much powerful than mine, but with two large and high-res screens, in a quiet, clean, sound and child-proof room. A nice internet connection would help a lot. My laptop would be much more thinner and lighter, the screen would not be useless on sunlight and the batteries would last a full day at least. I’m not asking much, am I?

I have much interest on messing around with game designing and development, and play with hardware on Arduino and Raspberry Pi.