Uses

Somebody asked me in December what I use for pulling colors out of a design. Somebody else asked what my terminal setup is. And a junior at work asked which editor, which is a question with a boring answer and a slightly less boring explanation.

I answered all three from memory, badly, and in the case of the color thing I recommended something I hadn’t opened in two years.

So I’ve written a /uses page, which is a small genre that’s been going around for a couple of years now: a page on your own site that lists what you actually work with. There’s a directory collecting them, and there are a few thousand of them out there, and I put off writing one for ages because it seemed a bit self-regarding.

Having done it, I’d say two things. It’s the highest-value-per-hour page I’ve ever put on a website. And writing it was an audit I didn’t know I needed.

A page that answers the question once

The obvious pitch first, since it’s the reason to bother.

This question gets asked a lot, and the asking is friendly and the answering is tedious. Answering it once, properly, on a URL, means the next 12 times cost you one link. That’s the same argument as writing anything down, and it’s fine, and it isn’t why the genre is interesting.

The interesting property is that these pages get linked to for years. Not shared once and forgotten like a post, but referred back to, because the question keeps recurring for everybody. It’s one of about four page types I’ve ever put up that still gets traffic 18 months later, and the other three are all technical posts about a specific error message.

The list isn’t the interesting part

Here’s my actual opinion about this genre, having read a couple of dozen of them while writing mine.

Most of them are a receipt. A list of nouns, sometimes with affiliate links, and you finish reading knowing what somebody owns and nothing about how they work.

The ones I’ve found genuinely useful all do the same thing, which is that they say why, in a sentence, and they say what they tried and dropped. The dropped ones are the most useful entries on the page and almost nobody includes them, because a list of failures doesn’t look like a list of achievements.

The tools somebody abandoned tell you far more than the tools they kept, and they're the entries nobody puts on the page.

“I use this editor because it opens a 40 MB log file without dying, which the last one didn’t” tells me something. “Editor: [name]” tells me what’s popular.

What’s actually on mine

Roughly the shape, if it’s useful to anyone deciding what to include.

The editor, and specifically the four extensions that earn their place rather than the 26 I have installed. Nobody wants the 26. I’ve had the same three-line snippet configuration since 2016 and that’s more interesting than the theme.

The terminal, which changed this year because the operating system switched its default shell over and I finally moved my config properly rather than carrying a decade of accumulated aliases across. Half of those aliases turned out to reference tools I no longer have installed.

The browser and its extensions, which for me is mostly a devtools story and one color picker.

The local development setup, which is the entry people actually want and which almost nobody writes down, because it’s embarrassing and specific and involves at least one thing you’re not proud of.

The design tools, where my honest answer is that I open whatever the designer sent me and I’ve been resisting learning a second one all year, and I suspect I’m going to lose that argument in 2020.

And then the boring physical things: the chair, the monitor, the keyboard, the notebook. These get read more than the software section, which surprised me, and I think it’s because software recommendations are everywhere and “which chair, from someone who sits in it eight hours a day and isn’t sponsored” is scarce.

Date it

The one structural suggestion I’d make to anyone writing one.

Put a date at the top, prominently, and update it when things change rather than silently.

Partly because it rots. A uses page from four years ago that reads as current is actively misleading, and there are a lot of those, and I’ve been sent one.

But mostly because the rot is the interesting bit. A page that says “updated January 2020” and has a note at the bottom saying what was on it in 2018 is a small record of how a person’s working practice moved, and that’s worth much more than the current snapshot. It’s the same reason I’d rather read somebody’s changed mind than their conclusion.

I’ve kept the old entries at the bottom in a collapsed list with the year I dropped them. It cost nothing, and in five years it’ll be the only part I care about.

The audit was the surprise

The thing I didn’t expect: writing it honestly meant working out what I actually open, as opposed to what I’d say if asked.

Three things I pay for monthly and had not opened in over a year. One of them I’d have named in conversation as part of my setup, confidently, because it was, in 2017.

Two tools doing the same job, both installed, both configured, used interchangeably depending on which I happened to think of, which is not a workflow, it’s a habit with no owner.

And a whole category, image optimization, where my honest answer was “I drag them onto a thing” and writing that sentence down made me go and set it up properly in the build instead. That’s about four years overdue and it took 20 minutes, and it happened because I had to type a sentence I was embarrassed by.

What writing it changed

Canceled two subscriptions. Deleted one of the duplicate tools. Fixed the image thing.

The page took an hour and a half and is not, on its own, a very impressive artifact. But the genre has one feature I’ve come to think is the whole point: it’s the only writing format I know where the exercise is describing your actual behavior rather than your opinions, and it turns out I’m much better calibrated about my opinions.