Member-only story
Unlocking Peak Productivity: My 2024 MacBook Setup for Software Engineers
A guide to getting your MacBook ready for development
No need for introduction, software engineers are (mostly) nerds who love dark mode because it makes us more productive. Now, strap in, it’s going to be a long one.
A good chunk of this article will reference my previous article I wrote in 2022, and so I’ll link it below here.
Table of Contents
Command Line Tools
For the most part, everything remains the same as my 2022 article alongside some additions and optimizations. Here’s a quick rundown:
Homebrew
MacOS’ package manager. You basically can’t live without it.
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"
# After which, you'll be asked to add brew to your PATH
(echo; echo 'eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"') >> /Users/davidcjw/.zprofile
eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"iTerm2
As mentioned in my previous article, iTerm2 is a mandatory replacement for the built-in Terminal application. Here’s how the two apps compare (visually):
To install: brew install --cask iterm2
For future brew install commands in this article, feel free to use brew via terminal or Raycast. For customization of iTerm2, we need to install Oh My Zsh + PowerLevel10k theme.
