17 - James Best
Hey! This is Adib. I hope you’re enjoying this newsletter as much as I do!
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James is the Lead front-end engineer at Breedr, an Agritech startup focused on cattle management and supply chains. Starting his career 11 years ago in Bangkok working in a small agency. He then moved back to the UK joining Gravitywell, a small boutique agency focused on helping founders get their projects off the ground. His main focus has always been frontend and mobile but you will often find him poking around the backend too.
James loves the terminal and so many of his side projects are CLI tools. Recently they have been built in Go leaning on the amazing suite of tools from the love people at Charm. Most recently he has been working on a youtube-dl TUI called Telecharger. He occasionally writes on his blog and co-hosts the Salted Bytes Podcast.
Neovim and Terminal
He started using Neovim in 2015 and has used it ever since. He loves being able to make it his own and being able to tie all his favorite CLI tools to make the most incredible dev environment.
Favorite Tools
autojump: A cd command that learns - easily navigate directories from the command line
bat: A cat(1) clone with wings.
htop: an interactive process viewer for Unix systems
httpie: a command-line HTTP client
jq: jq is a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor
Atuin: Magical shell history
Raycast: Raycast is a blazingly fast, totally extendable launcher. It lets you complete tasks, calculate, share common links, and much more.
CleanShot X: CleanShot is a super powerful replacement for the macOS tool. It works exactly how I need it to.
Postico: The native Mac app for PostgreSQL
Proton VPN: High-speed Swiss VPN that safeguards your privacy.
Burp Suite: Web security.
Balena Etcher: Flash OS images to SD cards & USB drives, safely and easily.
Anki: Anki is a program that makes remembering things easy.
EasyRes: EasyRes is a fast screen resolution switcher for Mac OS X with live animated previews.
Dotfiles
You can find his dotfiles here.
His dotfiles configure a lot of his setup with things that are regularly scripted where possible. The at.sh script allows him to change his theme on the fly, setting up the themes for Neovim, Kitty, Tmux, spacebar. Most of his scripts lean on Gum from Charm adding nice UI elements to his script.
When he sits at his computer he will use one of his preconfigured Tmux sessions to get his environment set up with as little work as possible. This is all made possible with Teamocil.
Desk Setup
I use 2021 16” Macbook Pro M1 Max (always in clamshell position in a MOSISO laptop stand). Connected to that is a single 32” AOC monitor. There is nothing special about them.
I use a Realforce 87u keyboard and a Logitech MX mouse.
Lighting is provided by a vintage Anglepoise desk lamp and an LED strip behind the desk.
Books
Writing a compiler in Go by Thorsten Ball.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.