Every developer-leaning personal site eventually has one of these. Mine is short on purpose: tools matter less than people pretend, and the list churns more than it should. What follows is what I’m actually using right now — not a 2017 snapshot kept alive out of nostalgia.
Editor
VS Code with about ten extensions. The ones that earn their keep: the Astro extension (syntax), ESLint, Prettier, GitLens, and the built-in JSON + YAML support. I tried Zed for a few weeks and it’s good but I came back for the extension ecosystem.
Terminal
Ghostty. Fast, sane defaults, no ceremony. Before that I lived in iTerm2 for years. Before that, Terminal.app — which is also fine.
Languages I reach for first
- TypeScript for anything that will outlive a weekend
- Go for anything that needs to be a single static binary
- Python for one-off data work and notebooks
- Bash when “one-off” turns out to mean “ten times”
Git
Plain git from the command line. I’ve tried Tower, GitHub Desktop, the editor
integrations — none of them stuck. The CLI is faster once your fingers know it.
This site’s stack
Astro 6 static output, TypeScript strict, Tailwind v4, MDX, Cloudflare Pages, one Cloudflare Worker for the contact form. Self-hosted Source Serif 4. The whole thing lives in one repo with no build server beyond Cloudflare’s.
What’s deliberately not on the list
JetBrains, Jira, Slack apps that auto-launch on boot, browser extensions that “boost productivity.” None of those make me think better.
(Phase-4 generic placeholder — rewrite when you have a real list.)