A big part of being a developer is choosing your tools. What you use, when you use it, and which ones you actually enjoy using. Some of those choices come down to personal preference, and others feel closer to objective truth. Either way, most developers hold strong opinions about their setup or their favorite technologies to use. Here are mine.
Throughout my years of using computers, I have tried many browsers. Nowadays, I always find myself using Helium. It checks many of my boxes:
- vertical tabs
- split view
- good ad-blocking
- natively handles bangs
- minimal layouts for maximal screen real estate usage
- chromium based
“best privacy and unbiased ad-blocking by default. no adware, no bloat, no noise. made for people, by people.”
— Helium Team
And it’s open source. Everyone I’ve convinced to try Helium has loved it. I also recommend Zen. I daily drove it for over a year after Arc’s shift in direction, and it was a good experience, despite not being chromium based. My slight disdain for non-chromium browsers is worthy of its own post. Anyways, Zen has tons of customization and what they call “tweaks”, and it checks many of my boxes too. Too bad it’s not Chromium based.
Ghostty feels instantaneous. If you’re a professional developer logging multiple hours a day in a terminal, that reduction in micro-latency actually reduces brain friction. It’s fast, native, and feature rich. I enjoy the raw speed of GPU acceleration while also having the native feel of a high quality macOS or Linux application. I have tried to optimize my development environment for the best possible feedback loop, and Ghostty furthers that goal. It’s also the perfect home for my Neovim setup.
I have zero quarrels with Bash, I’m actually quite fond of its’ creator, Brian Fox. But for the past three years or so, I’ve been using Zsh (pronounced zee-ess-eight-ch, argue with the wall) and never seriously considered daily driving anything else. Although I do hear good things about the Fish shell, so maybe that’ll be the next shell I shill. Zsh’s enhanced autocomplete, vast plugin ecosystem thanks to Oh-My-Zsh, and improved history are just no-brainers for me.
Feel free to checkout my .zshrc file, I am very proud of my aliases, which are designed to relieve developers of excessive keystrokes and spare their future wrists of some pain. There are also some fun touches, like Interstellar quotes that greet you on every new terminal window.
Tmux is already great. Oh-my-tmux makes me love it even more. It has a nice out of the box polished look and powerline styled prompt, with a great default config. Once you start using tmux, the idea of having to manually re-open your project tabs every session becomes unthinkable.
For coding, I have preferred OpenAI’s models for a long time now. I’ve always gotten the best outputs when using the GPT models, and Codex is great too. Try using Wisprflow or another dictation tool to prompt your AI, it feels more way natural and intuitive.
For my day-to-day personal life AI needs, I typically find myself reaching for Google’s Gemini, as it’s ability to access the entire Google Workspace suite is incredible.
Once you try Raycast, you’ll never use Spotlight on a Mac ever again. It’s faster, more tailored for powerusers, and can also just get out of the way and work.
The custom keybinds changed my entire workflow. At all times, I can access my terminal with Shift + ⌘ + 1, browser Shift + ⌘ + 2, and IDE Shift + ⌘ + 3. No more ⌘+Tab’ing to cycle between the many applications I may have open at any given time.
Like I said earlier, I try to eliminate as much friction as possible. I also love having a color picker, clipboard history, or AI prompting just one ⌘ + Space away, plus there’s a ton of other extensions I haven’t even mentioned.
I daily drive my MacBook Pro (M4 Pro 24GB RAM) for work or any side programming work, which is still running macOS Sequoia (I’m holding out on updating to Tahoe and it’s Liquid Glass as long as possible).
My homelab is currently built on top of the Fedora Linux distro, frequently getting SSH’d into for more computing power, self-hosted LLM’s with Ollama, self-hosted cloud storage using Immich and Nextcloud, and my glorious media server with Jellyfin.
I highly recommend getting into self-hosting, and more specifically setting up your own media server using either Plex or Jellyfin. If you already have one, checkout Tailscale as well.
Yes. I paid $75 for a font. But for me personally, it’s worth every penny. It’s a beautifully crafted typeface, one that I enjoy looking at for long periods of time, as it has great readability and evokes the warm and fuzzy feeling of interacting with vintage technologies that I personally love. Berkeley Mono satisfies me in all the right ways. I mean, just look at it:
I’ve fiddled with plenty of solutions for note taking. Lots of them I’ll bet you’ll just find yourself wasting more time setting up a system that “feels productive”, more than it actually is. This meme sums it up rather well:
Over time, I’ve learned that the best solution for notes is the one that satisfies these two conditions:
- low friction for use
- you'll actually use it
Personally I landed on Notion, as it solves all of my current use cases. And I’ve stuck with it. Depending on your needs, Apple Notes may be the best solution. Don’t overcomplicate this, or try to “productivity-maxx” your note taking systems, it’ll turn into more work than it’s worth.
Although recently I have dabbled with Google Keep, as Gemini can interact with the Google Workspace suite and it makes my life a hell of a lot easier. Being a literal couple clicks away from converting a todo list I dictated on the way home, to automatically created calendar events based on importance & urgency in just seconds is amazing. That system I do recommend you try out.
Humans are notoriously bad at creating–and remembering–truly random strings of characters. That’s why password managers are the single most important tool for the average person to secure their digital life.
Whether it’s Bitwarden, 1Password, Proton Pass or even Apple Passwords, let the tools generate a strong and secure password for you, or use a strong client side password generator (like this one I created), and make your accounts more secure.
You should also be using two-factor authentication as well.
The most important factor in password security is length, as it exponentially increases the number of possible combinations an attacker must test in a brute force attack.
Leading organizations like the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) recommend a minimum length of 16 characters or more, to remain sufficient against advanced, modern attack vectors.
I built a password generator that uses 3x that requirement, following a philosophy of “security through over-engineering” in order to provide the highest practical level of entropy and future proof credentials.
Always use a password manager with this tool.
It seriously works. Whenever I want to focus and get some deep work done, I reach for Brain. Here’s a 30 minute focus track, similar to what I use for Pomodoro sessions.
It’s easily one of the best tools for continuous learning. Whether it’s deep diving into a new framework or keeping up with industry trends, these are some of the channels I recommend that consistently provide high signal content.
- The Programming Podcast – Leon and Danny are the best. On the Programming Podcast they frequently travel through “Gem City”, dropping the best knowledge on how to succeed in the tech space today, while also keeping you up to date on the software engineer space in general. Check out 100Devs as well, it’s an amazing program and community.
- Lex Fridman – Lex brings on a diverse list of guests (many of them being experts in their respective field), oftentimes having very long form conversations with them about tech, or the future of humanity from both technical and interesting persepectives. You can tune in and hear deep conversations on tech with DHH (creator of Ruby on Rails), or my favorite episode so far, a conversation with the US’s most wanted cybercriminal Brett Johnson. I also enjoy his interviews with tech CEO’s and with those on the frontier of AI.
- Theo – Opinionated deep dives on modern software engineering, based on his experience and expertise. All wrapped up in an approach that includes no nonsense and just a bit of fun controversy at times.
- Syntax – Wes, Scott, and CJ do a great job of blending fun and technical expertise into one. They use their real world experience to weigh in on trending tools and frameworks, and also use their skills for fun challenges and games that scratch an itch many dev channels do not. The guys over at Syntax provide both a fun and insightful high level perspective on web development.
It’s the industry standard for a reason. I’ve used variations of Serato software for 10+ years, starting with Scratch Live and Itch, to now Serato DJ Pro. Nothing else comes close. If you are serious about DJ’ing, use Serato. You’re welcome.