Best Hardware Productivity Tool for aiding in Software Development

Question

What hardware device do you use, that helps aid your software development productivity?

The obvious would be a killer keyboard, mouse and multi-monitor rig... but what else do you use, that helps you out?

Answer 1

a computer :)

Answer 2

No hardware trickery is going to help as much as knowing your development tools deeply.

It's all in the software and how you use it.

Answer 3

In no particular order:

• Coffee
• Intranet/Internet
• "Silent" button on my cell phone
• Teammate
• "Cold" button on the air conditioner
• Door that closes
• Warning sign on door

Updates:

• Off-site backup
• Teddy bear

Answer 4

paper ... pencils ... whiteboard ... {insert your favourite scribing tools here}

Nice to have a couple monitors, fast machine, good keyboard, mouse etc, but I usually find I can be a lot more productive in front of the 'puta if I move away from it first.

Answer 5

An obscure one, for those of you who are working in enterprise with large data repository:

SRDF: when you data server fails, but all your data are replicated in real time due to special hardware data lines and SRDF, you would not believe the productivity gain you have, as opposed to send 200+ developers home ;)

Answer 6

Aside from a computer and associated hardware, I very often need the telephone and my notebook. Talking to our (in house) customer to find out what he exactly wants (or needs) is probably the most important part of my work. I always needed to ask daily to work out some details of the requirements. Maybe we need to review our specification process, or perhaps we are just agile...

Anyway, the telephone to ask questions, and the notebook to write down the answers and work out how to turn them into source code.

And of course, most important: Coffee machine ;-)

Answer 7

In an office w/o cubicles, noise-canceling on-ear headphones. When someone calls you/talks to you pretend you don't hear.

Answer 8

Items I use or attempt to get for development environments:

• More than one montor - you can never have too much screen real estate.

• A Black & Blum Propello Fan - alleviates stuffiness and thery're very quiet. Poking your finger into the fan gets good reactions ;-}

• A variety of free software tools, even if using Windows. Specifically: ActiveState Python, vim, Cygwin and/or unixutils (the latter are based on msvcrt.dll and integrate better with command files). Sometimes I have occasion to use MikTeX.

• If possible, an office. Sadly, often this is not possible, but I did some of my most productive work in a horrible 1950's building in a hospital once. The secret: offices. It was laid out like most buildings of the era - long and narrow with a corridor down the middle and offices on either side. Simply not having the distractions of an open-plan building did wonders for my ability to concentrate on my work.

Answer 9

I use a few different things to help me maintain productivity.

• My iPod Touch
• Microsoft Sidewinder 6000 keyboard
• Diet Coke
• StealthSwitch to lock my workstation when I'm playing WoW and my boss walks up.
• My puppy, but I don't think he'd like being referred to as "hardware."

Answer 10

Post-it notes

Answer 11

• coffee
• nice headphones
• comfortable chair
• big desk

Environment for comfort (you can work longer with pleasure) Coffee and headphones for speed (with the right kind of music my speed increases and I'm also seperated from distraction :)