nerdy bio

Who are you, and what do you do?

Hi, I'm Liz, and I'm a principal developer advocate at [Honeycomb][], a company that provides developers with high quality observability so that they can debug problems faster and experience less downtime. I work at the intersection of engineering, marketing, and product, and often collaborate on innovative projects such as with [AWS][] on adoption of Graviton2/3 at Honeycomb, with competitors on OpenTelemetry, and more.

What hardware(tools) and software do you use?

I have quite a few devices:

1. Because of my chronic fatigue, I work about 2-4 hours per day from bed, where I use a 2017 [Pixelbook][] with [Chrome OS][chrome-os] for browsing and an [Ubuntu][] container for Linux tasks and SSHing to places.
2. I spend another 1-2 hours per day in my recording booth for meetings, podcasts, and recorded talks, where I have a tiny 3.3L Mini-ITX computer built on an [AMD Radeon 4750G processor][ryzen-7-pro-4750g], connected with a fiber backhaul for extra reliability. And the rest of my day is spent at my desk. I have connected via a KVM to two 24" 1920x1200 monitors.
3. My main work device, a Cortex A72-based [Honeycomb LX2K][honeycomb-lx2] (no relation to my employer) in a tiny 4.5L Mini-ITX case
4. My main gaming device, a [Ryzen 5600X][ryzen-5-5600x]-based computer with a [RX 6800 graphics card][radeon-rx-6800] in a suitcase style 9.5L Mini-ITX case with a carrying handle.

Full specs at: https://gist.github.com/lizthegrey/ef5873f0b253fe61125c35f0c9fc1a9f

And 95% of Honeycomb runs on Graviton2 in AWS and uses a second copy of Honeycomb to debug Honeycomb prod, so that's where I'll be debugging and evaluating my experiments!

All of my devices are standardized on Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa; when 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish comes out, I'll upgrade everything across the board.

Most of my daily work happens in the [Slack][] electron app, [Zoom][zoom.2], [Chrome][] ([GitHub][], [Gmail][], [CircleCI][], etc), and [Discord][]. The standard Ubuntu/[GNOME terminal][gnome-terminal] works fine, but I've customized my [bash][] with [powerline][powerline-shell], and use [nano][] as my daily driver editor.

What would be your dream/dream setup?

I think I have it already! My collection of small, modular, purpose-built computers has served me well by enabling me to have the compute I need when and where I need it. I can just shove my devices into a suitcase, pack clothing in around them for shock absorbence, and attach them to existing monitors on the other side if I'm visiting a friend in another city. This also means I avoid being stuck with parts that cannot be modularly replaced, as I would if I tried to get a laptop that could "do everything".