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Q&A with Anselm Hannemann

Freelance front-end developer and Open Source advocate

I am a freelance web developer specializing on front-end experiences for websites and digital magazines. I would describe myself as an Open Source advocate contributing to different projects, writing articles about new web technologies and participating in webstandards. I also spend a lot time speaking at or attending to conferences and giving workshops.

My latest project I am involved with is the front-end framework called INIT which kickstarts your initial website setup with GruntJS, bower, and more cool things.

Hardware

An Apple MacBook Air 11" with 250GB SSD and 4GB RAM. That is basically enough for me and I even use it for all Adobe Creative Cloud Applications. Mostly if I'm in my office I use an external Apple Display. To add things up, I have my personal little Device Lab including several tablets and smartphones to test websites on. And there is some travel hardware (e.g. a battery pack) I wouldn't want to miss anymore.

Software

As base I use OS X system. I mainly use SublimeText2 as code editor together with my Terminal (where git, ruby, GruntJS, and other helper tools run constantly). I use Google Chrome Stable as my personal main browser and Google Chrome Canary constantly runs as my dev-browser. Other browsers are there but only used if needed for testing websites.

Other software I use for work is the Creative Cloud bundle from Adobe to achieve all the visual tasks in my work and to edit my photos.

For writing I use IA Writer to create a first draft of my article. If I'm writing the article all alone I stay there, otherwise I now switch to tools like editorially.com to have collaborative writing.

For writing Mails I use Apple Mail, for tweets I use TweetBot for Mac, I would love to get rid of Skype but this won't happen soon as many clients still go this way, and I use Google Hangouts as Skype alternative.

My little helper tools on my Mac are super helpful and important: Dropbox syncs my whole localhost so I can access my projects through Dropbox on other systems as well. Backblaze runs an encrypted cloud backup of my whole system and has been incredibly useful since several times already, 1Password stores all the passwords and users for me.

Then, for presentations I switch on Caffeine, a little helper that prevents the system to go to sleep on battery mode.

And if I'm not presenting, f.lux App adjusts the color temperature of my monitor in the evening which is much more relaxing than the blueish standard-temperature during the day.

Dream

Oh, just as simple as a little bit more powerful MacBook Air with a better display and more battery power. Apart from that I am super happy with my current hardware already, we can be glad to have such powerful machines.