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Laptop Setup

While you are welcome to customize your laptop, here are some tools that have worked for others on the engineering team!

  • ChromeDriver for headless website testing
  • chruby for managing Ruby versions.
  • Cloud Foundry CLI for command line access to 18F's Cloud Foundry-based application platform
  • Caulking checks for many common types of API tokens and other sensitive information before you commit
  • GitHub Desktop for setting up your SSH keys automatically
  • Homebrew for managing operating system libraries
  • Homebrew Cask for quickly installing Mac apps from the command line
  • Homebrew Services so you can easily stop, start, and restart services
  • gh (official) or hub (unofficial) GitHub-maintained CLI tools for interacting with the GitHub API
  • nvm for managing Node.js versions if you do not have Node.js already installed (Includes latest Node.js and NPM, for running apps and installing JavaScript packages)
  • pyenv for managing Python versions if you do not have Python already installed (includes the latest 3.x Python)
  • ruby-install for installing different versions of Ruby
  • Slack for communicating with your team
  • The Silver Searcher for finding things in files
  • Virtualenv for creating isolated Python environments (via pyenv if it is installed)
  • Virtualenvwrapper for extending Virtualenv (via pyenv if it is installed)
  • Zsh as your shell

Licensed Software

  • Docker for all your containerization needs

    The docker daemon and docker CLI tools are available on a free license.

    Docker Desktop requires a paid license. Ask in #admins-docker in Slack to get a license.

Other customizations

  • Atom - GitHub's open source text editor
  • Exuberant Ctags for indexing files for vim tab completion
  • Firefox for testing your website on a browser other than Chrome
  • iTerm2 - an awesome replacement for the OS X Terminal
  • reattach-to-user-namespace to allow copy and paste from Tmux
  • Spectacle - automatic window manipulation
  • Sublime Text 3 for coding all the things
  • Tmux for saving project state and switching between projects
  • Vim for those who prefer the command line
  • VSCode - Microsoft's open source text editor

These suggestions were culled from the deprecated (as of October 2020) laptop script. If you are looking for references on how to build personal dotfiles, that repo may be of use.

18F Engineering

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