What's in your Dock, Bryant?

Speaker 0: Hey, hey. Brian here from Directus and I I guess today I'm actually breaking down what's in my dock. Now our CTO, Wrike, did one of these videos not too long ago and there's a lot of overlap in our setups. So I'll try to cover some of the apps that he didn't mention, but if you haven't checked out his video, definitely give it a watch to see what he's running. Alright, so let's dive in.

Right? Onto like my main squeezes, the daily drivers. First up has got to be Missive. Hands down, the only email app you'll ever need. I've been using it for years.

Now what makes it special? Well, I can manage both work and personal inboxes in a single app. That's the biggest thing. No more bouncing between Gmail tabs or different applications. And, you know, if you're working with a team, the collaboration features are killer, especially if you're just sharing inboxes with said team.

Alright. Next up is gonna be Raycast. I use that for navigating and launching apps, and I was an Alford user for a lot of years. Even built a few plugins for that, but, honestly, Raycast blows it out of the water. Quick app switching, the clipboard history is probably what I use most.

It's just become one of those tools that I can't imagine working without anymore. I do pay for the Pro plan, but honestly, I don't use the AI features a ton because the experience is just a little clunky compared to some of the dedicated apps. For API work, I'm using Bruno. If you've caught any of my 100 Apps one hundred Hours episodes, you've probably seen me using it to make API calls. It's a great open source alternative to Postman, the interface is a lot cleaner, and it's been super reliable for me.

I've also recently switched to Orb Stack as a replacement for Docker Desktop. It seems to be a lot lighter on resources, it starts up a lot faster for me, and it it really just feels more native. So definitely give it a look. Now, on to videos, which is what I get asked about most. So, like my setup, I get questions on all the time on the YouTube channel, both privately in the Discord community and sometimes via email.

We do a lot of different styles of videos, so I'm gonna do a quick breakdown here of what I'm using. As far as the video apps, Loom is my go to for sharing quick updates with the Direct Discord team or within the Directus community. If you need to explain a bug or show how something works, just click Record, boom, I get a link to share and then I'm done. That's it. For those UI focused recordings where you see me zipping around the screen, with all the slick animations, I'm using Screen Studio.

It automatically adds those smooth zooms and highlights, and it makes just UI demos way more engaging. 99% of the time audio is off for those videos. When I need something more robust for longer form content, I'm using ScreenFlow. The editing capabilities within it are super quick and lightweight. It's perfect for me to put out, quick, but yet still polished videos.

Most of the time though, I'm exporting for our main man, Nat, who is our editor. And Nat, you should probably edit yourself in here taking a battle somewhere because you are freaking amazing. And then the little mouse highlight pointy thing that everybody asks about, that's Mouse Pose. It's a nice simple little tool with a hot key, it makes following those cursor movements so much easier for viewers, and I've been using it for so long, like, using it to explain stuff has become second nature to me. As far as the video gear that I'm using, on the hardware side, my mic is the Rode VideoMic NTG.

It's a bit older, maybe like five, six years old, but the sound quality is incredible for the price point, and I can use it both on my camera or mounted on my desktop here. The headphones that you always see me in are Sony WH-one thousand XM5s. I recently upgraded because my dog got a hold of the old pair. These are pretty pricey, but, I've got three little girls so the noise cancellation is definitely worth it to me. Everything plugs into a CalDigit TS USB hub.

I've got the TS three plus. There's a newer version available, but this one has worked for me for years. I still can't get to that one cable nirvana though because I've got two of these, LG five k displays and my MacBook Pro doesn't run all of that through a single cable. For the camera, I've got a Sony a 6,400 with a Sigma sixteen millimeter lens. That's what gives me that nice bokeh effect that you see in the background.

All that is connected through an Elgato Cam Link four k, which converts the HDMI signal to USB and lets me plug that into the computer. The mood lights in the background, those are Govee light bars. I think that's how you pronounce it. I have their iPhone app so I can just change the vibe depending on what I'm recording or, you know, sometimes my mood that particular day. If it's Christmas, I can turn on Christmas lights.

Amazing. Alright. So for a little more spicier territory, AI. Right? You've probably seen me use AI in some of the hundred apps, hundred hours episodes if you've caught any.

But here's what I'm actually using day to day. Claude has become my daily driver. It's part of my workflow in some form just about every single day. I could be using it for, like, creating ASCII art for a rabbit that I need for a CLI app. Don't judge me.

Or summarizing documents or content that I don't have time to read. Recently used it for, like, health insurance research. Or, you know, work related. I'm writing meta descriptions for blog posts or, Directus TV episodes. I'm also using Cursor for coding, which, you know, I have a love hate relationship with at the moment.

Auto completion works amazingly well probably 75, 80 percent of the time for what I use it for. But most of the LLMs still have the older Directus SDK syntax memorized, so you have to prompt it a bit to pull that out of it. The agent feature in cursor is is interesting. You know, I've used it on some greenfield projects or some new features. With existing code bases though, it's kinda been, a bit of a mixed bag for me.

Also AI wise, I've been playing a lot with replicate. I don't have a ton of time. I've got three little girls. So, like, setting up all these models and trying to run them locally for me is is not an option or just something I'm not willing to commit to. So, for image generation, I've been playing around with the Flux models.

So if you've seen any weird AI generated images, from me that's where they're coming from. I like replicate because it's quick and easy to experiment, and I've even run a couple of fine tunes using their platform. So that's it. You know, the tools I use mostly just to help me get the job done quickly. I'll see you in the community and on Directus TV.