We spend a lot of time following the thought leaders in web development, in many cases using the tools and libraries they've built, reading the posts they've written, articulating cool techniques they've learned, and in some cases, attending the defining conference for a specific language. But wouldn't it be great to learn what they focus on and what they use to build such awesomeness?

I reached out to a group of some of the best and brightest developers in web development to answer those very questions. These are developers that have made strong contributions to the web development community, are highly regarded by their peers for their technical abilities, and continue to help push web development forward via content, code, and leadership. You can check out their bios, below, for more details about them.

These folks are incredibly busy, so I narrowed my questions down to four simple ones:

1. What's your primary development focus?
2. What hardware are you using for development?
3. Which editor or IDE do you use?
4. What software can you not live without on a daily basis?

Below, you'll find the answers they gave and hopefully discover some tools that could make your development much easier. You'll definitely find common themes (Sublime) and a few nuggets that are new, at least to me.

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Scott Gonzalez

Bio: I'm a full-stack web application developer, with a focus on JavaScript. I've been contributing to jQuery since 2007 and I'm currently the Project Lead for jQuery UI. I'm active in the Node.js, WHATWG, and W3C communities as well.

Connect with Scott on his Blog and Twitter.

Web development, mostly client-side JS and Node.js.

MacBook Pro.

Sublime Text with TrailingSpaces, Pretty JSON, GitGutter, and Markdown Preview.

Git, GitHub, Apache, Chrome, Linkinus, Skype, Node.

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Raymond Camden

Bio: Raymond is a senior developer evangelist for Adobe. His work focuses on web standards, mobile development, and ColdFusion. He's a published author and presents at conferences and user groups on a variety of topics.

Connect with Raymond on his Blog and Twitter.

My primary development focus, in general, is on web standards, Creative Cloud (with a focus on the HTML tools), and typically the "non-sexy" part of client-side dev. I can appreciate CSS, but I get more excited by things like storage, JavaScript, and forms.

My hardware is a MacBook Pro. I do a lot of mobile development though, so I test with an iPhone, an Android phone, and various tablets. Oddly, the only Microsoft hardware I use daily is my keyboard. I've been using "Natural" keyboards for almost 15 years. I'm addicted to them.

My editor is Brackets, an open source editor we launched about a year or so ago. It's got great ties to Chrome and a cool extensibility layer.

Based on what I see in my OS X dock right now, the tools I use every day are my browser, my editor, Tweetdeck, and Evernote. (I keep everything in Evernote, from project stuff, to random tips.)

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John-David Dalton

Bio: JDD is the co-maintainer of jsPerf/Benchmark.js, an ES5 compliance evangelist, a JavaScript library enthusiast, a two time Microsoft MVP recipient for IE testing, and a Chakra performance program manager at Microsoft.

Connect with JDD on Github and Twitter.

Low level utility libs and benchmarking. I'm a libs fan, and dev'ing around them. JS development isn't my day job at Microsoft, so no client work or anything like that.

My day job dev'ing is done on Windows 8 and IE10. My personal dev machine is a 13" MacBook Pro running OS X 10.7.5, with a 2.3GHz processor and 8GBs of RAM.

I use Komodo Edit on OS X and Windows. I love its advanced search. I search by regexp and nested files all the time.

I use just about every browser..

Besides my text editor, I use total finder for OS X (this makes its windows manageable). I also have just about every browser; 22 different Chrome versions, five versions of IE, 23 versions of Firefox, 12 versions of Opera, and six versions of Safari. Before I release a version bump, I ensure the given project runs in the environments/browsers that I state it should run in, which is why I have all the browsers. I also have Node, Ringo, Rhino, and Narwhal.

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Stephanie Sullivan Rewis

Bio: Stephanie is Director, Web Strategy and Marketing Technologies at Contatta. As a front-end developer, she's presented sessions at conferences worldwide, including HOW Design, UI16, An Event Apart, Microsoft's MIX, Macworld, SXSW, Adobe Max, and numerous others. She's a published author, and while principal at W3Conversions, worked with a wide variety of organizations from Newsweek, MLB, New York Magazine, Adobe, and SalesForce.com to Disney's "TRON" movie site.

Connect with Stephanie on her Blog and Twitter.

I'm a front-end dev, but I'm wearing a few extra hats due to being in startup mode at Contatta. That means I have the honor of choosing and implementing our new corporate CMS—so I'm digging into PHP a bit, in addition to my usual development.

I don't use any special hardware. I work on a 17" MacBook Pro (that I haven't upgraded because I don't want to downsize to a 15"). If I'm at my desk, I'm also plugged into a second monitor. I choose to buy my monitors somewhere like Costco, rather than using the high-end models, so that I can view my site like "an average user" does.

Currently, I'm using Sublime Text 2 for daily development. However, if Adobe's open source code editor, Brackets, keeps going in the direction they showed at MAX, I'll probably give it a whirl at some point. I also use Dreamweaver to build my email campaigns in.

I give Chrome a daily workout, sometimes with over 150 tabs.

Outside of my editors, I always have CodeKit to compile my Sass and minify my CSS and JS. I use Git for Source control and push my code to the repository via Tower.

I use HipChat to communicate with the rest of the company throughout the day. But the best thing about HipChat is Hu Bot, which handles the deployment from my Git repository to either staging or production. I adore my bot!

My designer uses Fireworks, so I sometimes have that open, slicing and dicing. (Yea, I know Adobe isn't updating it, but it does what he needs, so we'll have to pry it from his cold, dead fingers someday.) I always have Spotify open—usually playing an Artist Radio I make based on my mood or the kind of dev I'm doing (today, it's a Hellsongs station).

Finally, I give Chrome a daily work out, sometimes with over 150 tabs (yes, I have a problem). I use it both for the Inspector and the plugins that I can't live without (1Password, OneTab, ColorZilla, Cache Killer, and Dragdis, to name a few) as well as to house tabs of all the other things I have to keep track of, like Google Analytics, MailChimp, SproutSocial, Google Docs, and anything else I'm currently researching.

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Christian Heilmann

Bio: Chris Heilmann has dedicated a lot of his time to making the web better. Originally coming from a radio journalism background, he built his first web site from scratch around 1997 and spent the following years working on lots of large, international web sites. He then spent a few years in Yahoo building products, explaining and training people, and is now at Mozilla. Chris wrote and contributed to four books on web development and wrote many articles and hundreds of blog posts for Ajaxian, Smashing Magazine, Yahoo, Mozilla, ScriptJunkie, and many more.

Connect with Christian on his Blog and Twitter.

My primary focus is making sure that the next person taking over after me, gets code that is easy to understand and simple to extend. Sadly enough, this is going out of fashion and a lot of focus is placed on "getting it out the door". I really think that we learn the most from each other's work and where better to write clean and understandable code than in our deliveries?

My focus is the web, not just one browser or one closed environment. This means you need to be very flexible in your code. Being very flexible can mean making it work right here, right now, or spending time on making it easily extendable, for new features that may be added in the future. I think after 16 years of web development, we should be at a stage where we stop hacking things together and replacing them continuously.

MacBook Air, I am always on the go and have little space or time to set up large hardware components.

Sublime Text 2, it's incredible.

Browsers and their developer tools, the command line for Git, an IRC client, Dropbox and Spotify. I have found more and more, that I've become independent of fat client software and I use a lot of online services instead.

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Ryan Grove

Bio: Ryan Grove is a Sorcerer at SmugMug, a YUI reviewer, and was once an underage model for a Japanese clothing catalog. He likes pie, movies, pie, old style sailing ships, and pie.

Connect with Ryan on his Blog and Twitter.

I spend most of my time these days building client-side JS components and features for SmugMug. In my free time I write lots of Node.js code and occasionally some Ruby (although JS has really taken over my focus in the last few years). At SmugMug, our framework of choice is YUI 3, and I'm also a core reviewer for YUI, so I contribute a lot of code to it and also review changes from other committers and contributors.

On a typical day, I might write some non-public SmugMug code, some open source SmugMug code, and some open source YUI code. We try to open source as much of our JS as possible, and a lot of that goes back into YUI these days.

When I'm traveling I use a 13" Macbook Air.

I work from home on a 2.8GHz Quad-Core Mac Pro with 16GB of RAM, an SSD, and two 30" HP ZR30w monitors that are fantastic for viewing big gorgeous photos and videos. When I'm traveling I use a 13" MacBook Air (mid-2011, Core i7), which I love to death. Although, the screen isn't quite as good as my desktop setup for viewing big gorgeous photos.

I also have a ridiculous collection of mobile devices that I use for testing. At least one of every model of iPhone and iPad, several Android devices, a Windows phone, and a Chromebook.

I use Sublime Text 3 for everything. I want to marry it and have its kittens.

In addition to Sublime Text, my must-have apps include JSHint (for keeping me honest), iTerm 2, Adium (for IRC), OS X Messages (for iMessage and Jabber), Tower (a GUI Git client), Dropbox and Rsync (for syncing source and data across various machines), Arq (for backup), Gmail, GitHub, and of course Google Chrome as my browser of choice.

SmugMug has lots of remote workers, so we use Google Hangouts for meetings and quick face-to-face chats. Additionally, IRC is an important communication medium for us. SmugMug has its own IRC server with a znc bouncer, and I use the Colloquy iOS app to get push notifications if someone mentions my name or sends me a message while I'm not at my desk.

Charles, cURL, and the REST Console Chrome extension are indispensable for debugging HTTP requests and working with APIs. Oh, and I've gotten so used to using Alfred (an app launcher and search tool) that I can't function when I use a machine that doesn't have it installed. I hit Control+Space and type "mdn [something or other]" about a thousand times a day to look up docs, among many other things.

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Cody Lindley

Bio: Front-end/UI/JS engineer and author. Lover of Christ, people, logic, and the dying art of debate, conversation, and rational thinking. Husband and father of three boys.

Connect with Cody on his Blog and Twitter.

My focus is on front-end code (i.e. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) used to build thick client web applications and websites for desktop users. I cross over into tablet and mobile web development when necessary.

My setup for years now has been a MacBook Pro, 27" Apple Display, Apple Magic Mouse, and an Apple wireless keyboard.

I use the Sublime Text 2 editor.

That would be SmartGit, Sublime Text, Divvy, JumpCut, Google (search, gmail, drive, calendar), Skype, Terminal, Chrome, Tweetdeck, Parallels, Textual, Dropbox, Github, Assembla.

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Luke Smith

Bio: Locally sourced, (indirectly) grass fed, all organic web developer out of Portland, Oregon. I'm fortunate to work with the amazing and inspiring team at SmugMug. Speaking of amazing and inspiring teams, previously I was a YUI core developer for five years, and am still contributing to the project today. Did I say team? I meant community. Seriously, you all are awesome.

Connect with Luke on Twitter.

More than anything, really, I like helping people out when I can.

I'm pretty much all JavaScript, all day every day. Specifically, I prefer to work on lower level API stuff, writing abstractions and tools to build other stuff on top of, such as event systems, promises, and XHR/data IO frameworks. I try very hard to make APIs that are intuitive, flexible, and fast. Principle of, least surprise-friendly stuff. But at the same time, I like solving little UI implementation challenges with higher level components. More than anything, really, I like helping people out when I can. I want to contribute more to JS, DOM spec, and standards work.

13" MacBook Air (one for work, one for personal), 2GHz Core i7 with 8GBs of RAM and a 500GB SSD (personal is 4GB/256GB). My work machine is hooked up to a 22" POS display that I bought years ago for extra real estate, an Apple keyboard, and a magic track pad. I hate the non-split keyboard layout, but love the key shape and action more, so I deal with it. I also hate the use of the word "magic" in the trackpad's name.

As to the Air, I've gone through a number of laptops and desktop units and until the Air, I never had any affection (good or bad) for the tech. The Air is awesome. It's the best laptop I've ever had, the best computer I've ever had. I genuinely love the thing. Fortunately, I haven't pushed its processing limits (yet) to the extent where beefier hardware is necessary. And I suppose I should mention the Yapster headset, since I work remotely. It's good enough for the money vs. how much I use it.

Vim FTW. That is all.

I live in Terminal, Vim, Git, and Chrome (dev tools \m/). Supporting staff are Shifter (for YUI stuff), Github's pull request and issues systems, VirtualBox, and 1Password. The distractionary cast and crew are: Mail.app (for lack of a better client), Itsy (minimalist twitter client), Reeder, iOS Reminders app, and Adium. I'm sure I'm missing several that I take for granted.

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Chris Williams

Bio: Chris is the VP of Product Engineering at SaferAging and the organizer of JSConf US and RobotsConf. He is the author of the node-serialport, originator of the JS Community Logo, and assists in the creation of amazing tech events like NodeBots and NodeCopter, among others. He is constantly inspired by his wife and two amazing children.

Connect with Chris on JSconf and RobotsConf.

My focus actually spreads across the entire bow of development these days, from programming and developing hardware sensors, to high availability server infrastructure and development, to frontend information presentation. In a given week, I will be soldering hardware, writing squirrel firmware, monitoring and upgrading servers, and developing new user interfaces and interactions (not necessarily web or visual based). To pick a single "primary" focus is tough because they are all supportive and necessary for creating the products I am working towards or supporting.

I mainly use Apple products (2010 MacBook Air when on the road, 2008 Mac Pro when at work, 2012 Mac Mini at home) due to their incredible construction quality and visual appeal. I split my time almost down the middle between raw terminal (Fish Shell yay!) use and GUI interface applications, so the fluidity between the two afforded by Mac OS X nicely supports my standard workflow.

I'll opt for different editors based on the contextual environment I'm working in.

I'll opt for different editors based on the contextual environment I'm working in. On servers, I'll use VIM simply because it's everywhere. On my local machine, I have opted for Sublime Text 3 at this point, though I am always dabbling with others, mainly out of curiosity rather than need.

I use a simple set of plugins (EJS, Emmet, Go, GitGutter, JSFormat, Squirrel) that basically provide syntax highlighting and formatting for me. I find standard IDEs to be too cumbersome and heavy. I get lost in all it provides to be honest. Even with Sublime, I often get lost in the key combos as I just want to get done, what I need to get done, no fluff, no pomp, just optimize on time to complete the task.

Sublime Text 3 (as mentioned above), but really that boils down to a raw text editor more than anything. iTerm2 and Fish shell have saved my life on a near daily basis. Wunderlist is something I basically cannot live without because I am just juggling too much stuff in my head at any given point. Outside of software, I couldn't live without my Das Keyboard -- typing on anything else these days feels unnatural and discomforting.

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Aaron Newton

Bio: Aaron Newton is a jack of all trades and, arguably, king of none. A veteran of numerous startups, most recently Cloudera, he is now Head of Product at Thanx, a mobile loyalty application. As a contributor to the MooTools framework from its first release, he has authored numerous tutorials, a book, and more code than he can ever hope to maintain, most of it being JavaScript.

Connect with Aaron on MooTools and Twitter.

These days I'm a product manager at Thanx. I'm very technical, so I have a lot of discussions about specific implementations while still doing code reviews and chipping in on development when I can. Our product is primarily a mobile application with a native iOS implementation and an HTML5 version for mobile browsers. We have an Android app which is basically a browser that uses this HTML5 implementation. I tend to contribute on the HTML5 implementation and also to our more traditional web appliations - a dashboard for our customers and internal tools for our own use.

My trusty MacBook Pro. Everything else runs on AWS / Heroku.

Lately Sublime. I was pretty hardcore about TextMate for years, but finally got tired of not having any updates. I like all the community support for Sublime (and that it can run TextMate plugins), but the two features that finally, really made me switch were the split views and, more than anything, the lightning fast search. Searching on TextMate is the new "my code is compiling so I'm going to go get a coffee."

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Ben Cherry

Bio: Ben lives in San Francisco, where he is an Engineer at Pushd, focusing on Ruby and iOS. Previously he built a failed startup on iOS and Node.js, and before that he wrote JavaScript at Twitter and Slide. He maintains a programming blog, mostly about JavaScript, at http://www.adequatelygood.com

Connect with Ben on his Blog and Twitter.

I spent three years doing heavy JavaScript for Slide and Twitter, but more recently I'm working on iOS and Ruby, while only occasionally working with JavaScript.

A 13" Retina MacBook Pro with a 27" Thunderbolt display.

SublimeText 2. I Love it.

That would be SublimeText 2, iTerm 2, Google Chrome, 1Password, Gmail, Flipboard, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit.

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Jacob Thornton

Bio: I write code @medium and I've opensourced a few things (like Bootstrap and Bower). I used to give talks and occasionally, I write about the web.

Connect with Jacob on his Blog and Twitter.

I suppose I spend most of my time on general front-end (JS/CSS/HTML) development, though I do a good amount of tool/build development and a fair amount of simple server work. I've also been trying to up my accessibility chops – meeting a lot of really rad/super helpful people in this space (like Victor Tsaran from Paypal and Joshua Miele).

I use a 15" Retina MacBook Pro at work and a 13" MacBook Air at home. I do a ton of testing on different devices though: iPads, iPhones, Android tablets/phones, Blackberry, and even Windows slate.

I use Sublime Text 2.

I use Sublime Text 2. I used Vim (poorly) for a while, but I found most other front-end developers didn't really use it either, and it was weird mentally, always switching back and forth for me. So, I just point and click like a noob now. Honestly, I'm terrible with computers. I know a lot of engineers who are so dope with their computers, and make all of this custom stuff happen, but I literally have no idea what I'm doing most of the time.

Rdio - I am useless without music.

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Lea Verou

Bio: Lea works as a Developer Advocate for W3C. She has a long-standing passion for open web standards, which she fulfills by researching new ways to use them, blogging, speaking, writing, and coding popular open source projects to help fellow developers. She's also a member of the CSS Working Group, which architects the language itself.

Connect with Lea on her Blog and Twitter.

Anything about the client-side: I do HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or even design and UX! However, I have a penchant for CSS, which became even stronger after I joined the CSS Working Group.

A 13" MacBook Air Ultimate that I bought last June. I love it. Its touchpad had some issues for the past few months, but I recently got it replaced so I fell in love with my lil' MacBaby (yes, I have a pet name for it, is there a problem? :) all over again.

Espresso. I know there are better text editors around, but its FTP integration is addictively good.

Native apps: Espresso, Transmit, CodeKit, Adobe Illustrator, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, WebKit nightlies, Chrome Canary.

Web apps: Browserstack, Dabblet, copypastecharacter.com, css.coloratum.com, Workflowy, and Github.

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Jonathan Snook

Bio: Jonathan Snook is a Web Designer/Developer who works at Shopify. He can speak, he can write, he can develop websites with all his might.

Connect with Jonathan on his Blog and Twitter.

These days, I mostly focus on front-end development. HTML, CSS and JavaScript fill up my time.

I have an 11" MacBook Air that is my primary machine. When it comes to testing, though, I prefer testing on an actual device as much as I can. I have a Samsung tablet with Windows 8, a Nexus 7, an iPad Mini, an iPhone, and even an older phone with WebOS. Okay, I might not use that last one very much. No BlackBerry device yet. For IE6 through IE9 testing, I use VMWare with Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows 8 VMs, too.

Vim. It's so handy and I like having something familiar to use when I'm logged into a remote Linux box.

Vim, of course, and my browser of choice these days: Chrome. I've been using Google Docs more and more, which has replaced Microsoft Office. Google has really been doing a good job at improving their toolset. I'm starting to buy into the whole Google ecosystem.

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Peter Wagenet

Bio: Peter has been developing web applications for nearly fifteen years. He is currently an Ember Core Team member, previously serving on the SproutCore team. He also has extensive experience with Ruby on Rails and has dabbled in iOS development. These days you can find him working for Tilde on awesome projects like Skylight.

Connect with Peter on Twitter.

I spend most of my time doing Ember development with a bit of Rails thrown in. Right now, I'm consulting two days a week on Ember and the rest is spent working on Tilde projects, mainly Skylight, which is an Ember client with a Rails backend. It also has a Java component, though I don't work on that.

I use a 2012 MacBook Air with a 2GHz Core i7 and 8GBs of RAM. I also have a 27" Cinema Display. I used to have a 20" LCD hooked up as well with a USB to DVI adapter, but decided to make my desk a little less crowded.

Recently I've been using Sublime Text 3. When I first started, I used TextMate, which I loved. However, I got tired of waiting for TextMate 2 and ended up switching to VIM. I fell in love with the VIM keybindings, but was still frustrated by the plugin experience and wished I could have something a bit more polished. For me, Sublime's Vintage mode gets 95% of what I did with VIM's keybindings, it has a better plugin architecture, and it's more polished. I've never felt a big pull towards using a full-blown IDE, autocomplete is good enough for me. The only full-blown IDE I've used is Xcode and I find that I'm always missing keybindings when I use it.

I browse in Chrome.

I browse in Chrome, though I've heard some cool things are in works for the Firefox dev tools, so I might be convinced to change. For chat and communication, I use Adium for AIM, GTalk, IRC and Flint for Campfire. I still use plain old Mail.app and the basic Twitter app as well. I'm not a huge power tools sort of guy, but I've been enjoying Divvy a lot recently for positioning windows. 1Password is also indispensable. Since I have a lot of menu bar items, I've also found Bartender to be super useful.

In Closing

So, there you go. You now have a nice reference to what many of the leaders in web development are using day in, and day out. We'd like to send out a big "Thank You" to all of the developers who participated!

Feel free to share the tools, hardware, editor/IDE, and software that you use everyday, in the comments.