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A picture of Coraline Ada Ehmke

Coraline Ada Ehmke

Web developer (Stitch Fix)

in developer, mac, musician

Who are you, and what do you do?

I'm the notorious social justice warrior Coraline Ada Ehmke. I work remotely from Chicago as a Principal Engineer for Stitch Fix. I'm an open source advocate, international speaker, and software developer with over 20 years of experience building apps for the web. I was recognized for my work on diversity in open source with a Ruby Hero award in 2016. I'm also the creator of the Contributor Covenant, the most popular open source code of conduct in the world with over 40,000 adoptions. I'm a founding panelist on the Greater Than Code podcast, and in my free time I work on a secret artificial intelligence project and write and record music as A Little Fire Scarecrow.

What hardware do you use?

2017 MacBook Pro, maxed out specs, side by side with a 27" Cinema Display. I use a Kinesis split mechanical keyboard and a Bluetooth Magic Trackpad.

In my music studio I also use a Presonus FaderPort 8, a LinnStrument MIDI controller, and an M-Audio rack mount audio interface. This lets me record my nine guitars, bass, Prophet analog synth, mountain dulcimer, and vocals and mix them to perfection. The studio is dominated by a walnut-stained Platform music production desk from Output. It's huge, solid, and versatile. It has room for nine racks worth of hardware, a two-tier work surface, and a slide-out tray for my MIDI controllers.

And what software?

If I'm doing Ruby, I do it in both Atom and BBEdit (I love the regex support in BBEdit and I've been using it since 1995!) For Go, I use Visual Studio Code; I'm fairly new to Go so I appreciate the help that an IDE gives me, and there are some great plugins for debugging and testing, too. For Swift I use Xcode. Some people might look down on me for using GUIs but I am a very visual person and I don't mind lifting my fingers off the keyboard from time to time. In the studio I use Logic X and adore it.

What would be your dream setup?

I wouldn't change a thing about my physical space. I work from home, which is great, and my desk is in a sunroom that is pretty much all windows (west-facing so I can see the gorgeous sunset at the end of my day.) I love my hardware setup but I would be even happier with two 42.5" 4k displays, one on either side of my laptop. Preferably on adjustable mounts. In the studio I would love to have a maxed-out 27" iMac dedicated to music production --- even my MacBook Pro has trouble keeping up with Logic at a decent sample rate. My Patreon is at... just kidding. Sort of.