The Joomla! Setup is a series of interviews with developers in the Joomla! community, talking about the tools they use to get the job done, inspired by the setup. We kick the series off with one of the ‘old ones’ of the Joomla! community. Can you tell who it is?

Andrew Eddie: Wearer of Many Hats

Who are you and what do you do?

I’m Andrew Eddie and I turned the big four-zero this year. I started my professional life as a civil engineer and did that for about 10 years. In the background was a love of computers and programming that started when I was 13 when I was introduced to the Apple ][. I cut my gums on Apple Basic, but then learned Fortran and C in university. My final year thesis in engineering was writing a solids model for building wireframe meshes (to punch into structural analysis software). After that I taught myself C++ and when I landed a job as a web developer in 2000 I started to learn HTML and Perl, then PHP came along and I was in my element.

Right now I work partly for myself, doing Joomla! consulting and training, and partly for the Joomla! project itself, right now mainly working on the new Joomla! 1.6 release.

Apart from my love affair with programming, I am keenly interested in astronomy, in the origin of the universe and what makes it tick. Closely related to that is the involvement in my church. My wife is a pastor and we are planting a community church in our local area. Add three kids and a scotch collie and that’s me.

What hardware are you using?

I used to be an ardent PC guy, but through some misfortune (with the PC), I’m an Apple guy now. I’m on my second MacBook Pro (I upgrade hardware every 3 years) — the 2.53 Intel Core 2 Duo model with the stock 4 GB of RAM. I should have gone with the next model up with the extra video card because now I’m doing a lot of video work — ah, well, only 2 years to wait to upgrade again.

I’ve recently invested in a RODE Podcaster microphone for better recording and very happy with that. My office is starting to look like a recording studio.

Also have an iPhone 3GS and am very excited about the prospect of my current plan ending so I can upgrade to a 4. Not really interested in the iPad until it gets a forward facing camera. I can wait for gen 2 or 3 on that one.

And I also have a PC (I can’t remember the specs on it now) for the accounting software and games (cheaper than prozac).

And what software?

I've all the stock OSX stuff. I use iLife's iMovie and Garage Band heavily for video production in conjunction with iShowU and Stomp.

For development my main tools are Eclipse with phpEclipse (haven’t tried Helios yet nor the new PDT – was too heavy last I looked). I use Smultron for light file edits; Sequel Pro for database administration; DeltaWalker for file and folder diffs.

For business and productivity I use Keynote for presentations and Pages and Numbers on occasion. I generally use OpenOffice for document and spreadsheet heavy lifting. TimeLog is indispensable to track my billable hours. I use OmniOutliner for advanced note taking.

As for browsers, I’ve got Safari, Firefox and Chrome installed. Until recently I was on Firefox but I’ve moved to Safari since the release of 5.0. Firefox was just getting too heavy for me. Chrome is really nice but a bit buggy with the WYSIWYG editors still (not sure why).

What would be your dream setup?

I’ll need a PC and a Mac. For the PC I’ll need something good enough to run Lost Planet with settings maxed out (I’m not up with the Intel hardware anymore but it’s going to be a quad-core, 16 GB of RAM and probably dual video card with an obscene amount of memory).

I love laptops so I’d upgrade to the best 15" (17" is just a bit big)— the 2.66 Intel core i7, 8 meg of RAM, hi-res (1680x1050) anti-glare screen and the biggest cinematic Apple display there is. Then we’ll have to upgrade the actual office as well so I can deck it out with 5.1 surround sound.