Uses
Course
Production
Here are some of the things that I use to produce courses.
- I use a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015), 2.5 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, 16 GB memory. It works fine for recording. Sometimes however, especially during summer when it's hot, the fan speed gets a bit high. That of course gets into the voice recording and then I have to deal with it when post-processing the voice.
- I don't record my laptop's screen directly. I have an ASUS VX248H 24" Full HD monitor connected to the laptop. I use the laptop's screen for looking at finished code or notes while recording. Although the laptop's screen resolution is higher than the monitor's, I chose to record the monitor since I don't need a higher resolution than 1080p. Recording the laptop results in unnecessarily large files.
- For screen recording and editing I use ScreenFlow. I used to use Camtasia wich I got for a good price using a promo code. However when I needed to upgrade to the newest verison I found out that ScreenFlow is almost half the price and it does everything that I want.
- I have recently been recording using a RØDE NT1 with a RØDE AI-1 interface. RØDE is also responsible for attaching the mic to the desk using the PSA1 boom arm. Before that I used to use a CAD Audio GXL2400. It was a great choice given its price, but the RØDE NT1 is much more superior.
- I use Adobe Audacity for post-processing my voice recordings. I do things like noise reduction, normalization, equalization, etc...
- I tried using soundproofing panels (as seen in the picture above). However it didn't work for me, I probably needed a lot of them in order to have an effect. I just tried moving my desk into a more "furniture crammed" place and the echo was significantly less.
Coding &
Services
Hardware, Code editor, softwares, terminal and more.
- I currently code on a MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015), 2.5 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, 16 GB memory. It's old but still working fine for me.
- I use VS Code as my main code editor for both; my daily work and recording courses and videos.
- I prefer dark VS Code themes. My current theme is Dracula. This is also the theme that I use when recording.
- I use Dank Mono as a font for VS Code. I also use this font on this website in the blog for code snippets.
- I use the default macOS terminal with the default Z shell. I am not sure why would I use another terminal to be honest 😁.
- Google Chrome is my main browser. I use other browsers for testing.
- I use MAMP for WordPress development, Postman for API testing, Notion for notes and task management, Slack for communication and Keynote for course presentations.
- This website is hosted on Netlify, the code is hosted on GitHub. Amazon's S3 and CloudFront are used to host some assets.
- I use GoDaddy for domain names.
- I use Sendy for newsletters. It's a self-hosted service which uses Amazon Simple Email Service. It's written using PHP and thus it needs the LAMP stack to be hosted. I use a DigitalOcean droplet with the LAMP stack installed to host it.