The Developer’s Travel Kit
What do you carry along in your laptop bag? Whether going to work or traveling for business, what technology do you lug around in your developer’s travel kit? I recently clean out my laptop bag and found the following contents…
I found that I carry a number of USB flash drives, currently I am making a good use of a 32 GB flash drive. I take a lot of pictures so I usually copy them on this flash drive before I can backup into a 1TB drive I have at home. I think that USB drives are like diamonds for techies in that we can never have enough. I also have two 8GB and a 4GB flash drive. In addition to the flash drives I also carry a card reader to quickly transfer pictures from my camera SD card to my computer. I do have a Lenovo T61 that has a built in card reader but I still need a USB card reader for other machines I interact with on a daily basis. In my laptop bag I also found a 500GB USB portable drive.
I also can’t live without pen and paper, I am always taking notes and doodling on scraps of paper. I carry with me a small notepad of yellow post-its. I also have a bunch of conventional pens and high lighters but they don’t get much use these days. I am an early adopter of the Pulse Smartpen and carry the Smartpen with a small smart pad of smart paper journal. I have written about the Smartpen and I am amazed with the technology.
Another piece of gadgetry in my carrying case is the Kindle electronic book reader. The Kindle is simply amazing. I currently have a whole bookshelf of technical books on the kindle. I have seriously thought of burning all the big, fat, obsolete books I have at home and at work and simply replace them with kindle editions. The one drawback with the Kindle is that it makes it too easy to buy books.
The last bit of equipment that make my developer’s travel kit complete is a Ubuntu Live CD. I recently had to use this live CD when trying to recover data from a compromised machine. A live CD is like the IT equivalent of a Swiss army knife.
Not officially part of my travel kit but I don’t travel anywhere without my iPhone. I have personalized my iPhone with a ton, of mostly free, useful games and applications. When waiting in line or on the commuter train I always pull out my iPhone to catch with emails, blogs, and news.
Do I haul around too much technology? I’ll be honest, I never meet a gadget I didn’t like. What is in your developer’s laptop bag?