Skip to main content

What's in my Bag 2027

Nearly ten years after the last one, here's what I actually carry. I travel far less now, so this is what comes with me if I leave the house at all.

Ten years on

I wrote one of these back in 2017. I found it again recently and the thing that struck me was not the gear, it was how much of it was for being somewhere else. Airports, conferences, a laptop small enough to work on from a tray table.

That is not my life anymore. Most of what I do happens at a desk in Cork, and I am on a plane a handful of times a year rather than a handful of times a month. So this is not a travel kit. It is what comes with me if I leave the house at all, whether that is a coffee shop for the afternoon or an actual trip.

The other change is that half of it is paper. In 2017 I carried a notebook out of habit. Now I carry two, and I use them.

What is what

It all goes in an Invertocat MiiR Laptop Backpack, which is GitHub merch and probably the most on brand thing I own.

  1. MacBook Pro (14-inch, M4 Pro, 2024) with 48GB of memory
  2. iPhone 14 in canary yellow
  3. iPad mini (A17 Pro)
  4. Apple Watch Series 11, 46mm in rose gold aluminium, with the Blue Ribbon Nike Sport Band
  5. AirPods Pro 2
  6. Beats Solo 4 in black, for when I want something over the ear
  7. Anker 10,000mAh power bank, 22.5W fast charging
  8. Chargers for all of the above, which is still the heaviest part of the bag
  9. Two Pentalic leather notebooks, a small one and a large one
  10. Two Sharpie S-Gel pens
  11. Sharpie double-ended markers
  12. A clear extra-large zip pouch that holds all the pens and markers, the three-ring binder sort
  13. Listerine Cool Mint Antiseptic Mouthwash, 250ml

What changed

The mouthwash is the only thing that survived from the 2017 list unchanged, which I find funnier than I should.

Everything else got bigger or got replaced. The 12-inch MacBook was the smallest laptop Apple ever made and I loved it, but I do real work on this one and 48GB of memory is the difference between running things locally and waiting. The phone went the other way: an iPhone SE then, an iPhone 14 now, and I still pick the smaller one where I can.

The pens are the part I would have found ridiculous ten years ago. Two notebooks and a pouch of markers is more paper than I carried when I was flying every month. Being dyslexic, writing things down by hand is how I actually think through a problem, and I stopped fighting that somewhere around 2020.