# Uses — Daine Mawer

> The hardware and software I actually open every day, and why.

Reviewed 2026-10-13. No affiliate links.

## Desk

- **MacBook Air 15″ M5** — 16GB. Fanless and light enough to carry everywhere, with a screen big enough that the desk setup is a preference, not a requirement.
- **Dell UltraSharp U3225QE** — 32″ 4K IPS with a Thunderbolt hub. One cable to the laptop carries video, power and every peripheral. Still a single display, not two.
- **Logitech MX Master + MX Keys S** — Wireless mouse and keyboard, paired to switch between devices. The scroll wheel is the part I would miss most.
- **iPhone 16 Pro Max** — The on-device test unit. A simulator will lie to you about haptics, camera, and real network conditions.
- **Samsung A26** — A mid-range Android on purpose. It is closer to what most users carry than a flagship, which is where React Native's cross-platform promise actually gets tested.

## Editor

- **Cursor** — Dark mode. The AI-assisted editor I work in day to day.
- **Biome** — Replaced ESLint and Prettier on new projects. The speed difference is not subtle.
- **Ghostty** — The terminal. Fast, native, and where both Claude sessions live.
- **Xcode + Android Studio** — Open for the simulators and native build tooling, not for writing code in either.
- **Expo CLI / EAS** — The actual dev loop for the React Native work — prebuild, dev client, and OTA updates without a store release.

## AI

- **Two Claude accounts** — Work and personal, kept apart and symlinked on my desktop as “claude” and “claude-personal”, each running in its own Ghostty window.
- **Remote control** — Both accounts are reachable from my iPhone and Android, so a long-running task does not need me at the desk.
- **Mac Mini** — Permanently on, kept awake with Caffeine, for any task that has to keep running while I am away.
- **Tailscale** — Device tunnels and access. It is how the phones reach the Mac Mini without exposing anything to the public internet.

## Measuring

- **Chrome DevTools** — Performance and Coverage panels. Almost everything I've written about performance started in one of the two.
- **WebPageTest** — Throttled mobile, Cape Town test location. Lab numbers from a fast desktop are a story, not data.
- **CrUX + Vercel Analytics** — Field data settles arguments that lab data starts.
- **React Native DevTools** — Replaced Flipper in the stack. Component tree, network, and the profiler in one place, without a separate app running.

## Shipping

- **This site** — Next.js, self-hosted fonts, deployed on Vercel. No client-side framework on article pages.
- **Vercel** — Where this site and most web projects deploy. Preview URLs per branch make review a link, not a checkout.
- **Neon / Supabase** — Postgres in both cases. Neon when I only need a database, Supabase when auth and storage come with it.
- **Storybook** — With visual regression. The subject of one of the more useful things I've written.
- **EAS Build + Submit** — Cloud builds for both platforms from one config, then straight to store submission without touching Xcode or Android Studio's own release flow.
- **TestFlight + Play Console** — Where a build actually lands in front of a client before it reaches the store.


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Attribution: Daine Mawer — https://www.dainemawer.com/about