Ask HN: Devs with ADHD do you use specialized tooling?

I agree! - The typical fast M.2 drive or an Apple drive: This is plenty. However! It's really, really, really surprisingly nice - surprisingly worthwhile! - to get more of those and stripe RAID the heck out of them.

rn I have a striped array of [Samsung 500GB M.2 (x4)] [Samsung 500GB M.2 (x2)] [Striped sub-array of 83⅓-GB portions of 6 Samsung 500GB SATA drives to use all the I/O bandwidth]. Did it mostly for "teh lulz" but it's actually kinda worth it +shrug+. Ultrasmooth somehow.

(Given that the backup strategy is hundred-percent-ly 100%.!!)

(Also: I like multiple monitors too. 2x32" 4K is pretty great. I've tried 4x24"/27" 1080P and it sort of didn't work for me. Mostly because there's kind of a minimum pixel tax per-display and it takes too much out of a 1080p surface. Hard to explain. It was hard to believe. But it's my experience.)

  j() {
    local FILE="/home/$USER/notes/journal.md"
    if [ -z "$1" ]; then edit $FILE && return; fi
    echo >> $FILE
    echo "$@" >> $FILE
  }

Those were perfect too. Only switched to the 55” OLED TV because I lost those monitors—One had to to back to the company that provided it for working at home… aaaaand I broke the other.

With big top-heavy monitors I have learned the lesson that all surfaces must be grippy towards each other under all circumstances. Also when and if the drawer-stand put under the monitor scooches 1mm out of the desktop area and off its grip-pads.

Actually the lesson is: Always just get adjustable gas-pump monitor arms for everything. Less clutter, more desk space, more flexibility, better ergonomics. It’s even more worth it than I suspected it would be. They cost less than I thought and make a bigger difference.

I have a nice little Ryzen 3900X machine. Reasonably lucky silicon - it runs at 4.2GHz at a slightly reduced voltage. 2 × 16GB DDR4-3200 CL14 sticks which are happy at 3400MHz CL14. I don’t recall the rank – it’s Crucial BallistiX. The sticks were too expensive for what they do! – I bought them as an experiment to see what the difference was if I got the fastest memory I could find without going to the scary steep part of the price-performance curve. There is a difference!, but not strictly worth it.

GPUs: I have Radeons – 5700 XT and 6800 XT. Those are overkill for development-only but very nice. The 6800 XT is smoother and snappier at driving a 4K desktop! I’m curious how the 6600 XT is. (I use AMD because I work on macOS; no Nvidia drivers.)

And I have a “throwaway” SSD RAID experiment right now: A 500GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus in the 4x M.2 slot, a 500GB Samsung 980 in the 2x M.2, and 500GB Samsung 860 Evo SATA drives in all six SATA ports.

Linux MD software RAID.

I made a sub-array that stripes across all the six SATA drives, on partitions that are one-sixth of 500GB. That sub-RAID is allllmost as fast as the NVME SSDs.

Then my nixOS root partition is on a big three-“drive” striped RAID made out of an NVME drive, the other NVME drive, plus the “poor mans sata nvme”. It goes pretty hard. Mostly did it to see what it’s like. It’s quite fast. There’s a sense of a lot of subperceptible bottlenecks all vanishing at once.

This is probably an UNRELIABLE setup! I have at least an eightfold failure rate compared to using a single drive! It’s an experiment! Haha! This-is-not-medical-advice, you know? The speed is noticeably good however.

BUT:

All in all I would just get an M2 mac these days! In the general case!

I did learn a ton building this and it’s very flexible, more flexible than a Mac. (However, flexible in ways that aren’t really that important.)

But yeah, if macs aren’t a preferred option, I want to state that my machine is not the machine I’d build now to match my suggestions on a working setup. I’d try for something maybe half the price with 98% of the performance.