My Hardware and Software Setup

It’s taken me a couple of years to sort out my perfect hardware and software setup for consulting so I thought I would share it with the rest of the world. The majority of my freelance front end development takes place in house with design agencies, i.e. I’ll borrow desk space in the office while I work through the various projects they’ve brought me in to help on. Working in house is far better then working from home (which is lonely!) or rented office space. You’re closer to the designers so the turnaround on asking questions is shorter, plus being in the office tends to generate more work for you as a freelancer as you’re more involved in day to day work and activities.

Hardware Setup

To keep a consitent work enviroment I bring an Apple Macbook that has been upgraded to two gigs of ram. Processer speed doesn’t matter too much when working in front end development, however ram is important when you’re working with some of the larger Photoshop or Illustrator files that can contain hundreds of layers. It’s worthwhile also purchasing a seperate keyboard and mouse, I find working on the Macbook keyboard can cause RSI after a few hours. A seperate mouse will free you up from the ball and chain that is the trackpad.

Software Setup

I run an older version of Photoshop purchased off eBay (CS1). I haven’t run into too many problems as the newer versions of Photoshop have great backwards compatability. Illustrator may be useful depending on the agency, often print orientated agencies will design sites in Illustrator, however conversion between Illustrator and Photoshop has progressed in leaps and bounds and you should not have too much trouble preserving layers.

For development I run Textmate. It’s at a perfect level of complexity and simplicity and the integration with the OS X shell is fantastic. I run lighty websever that has been aliased to serve the directory that I start it in, although it means I have to stop and start the webserver as I switch projects I don’t have to bother configuring hosts on my local machine making things nice and fast when adding new projects. 

For testing I run the virtual machine software Parallels which is installed with Windows XP. Inside XP I have MultiIE installed which allows me to test IE5.5 and IE6.0 while running IE7 as the native browser. Also installed alongside IE is Firefox 2 portable, Firefox 3, Safari 3, Opera and Google Chrome. Between Parallels and OSX, I can test every major browser on the market.