What I actually work on and with. Not a wishlist. If it's here, I used it this week.
I'm pragmatic about all of it. I don't hold tooling opinions on the basis of a rule or a "you should", and I have no interest in arguing about operating systems or dogmas. Which is convenient, because:
Gear
Classic MacBook Pro, plain macOS. It's the best operating system I've used: like Linux but usable. MS office, enterprise software.. Nothing I like using but you will need it. Every Linux box I own is a server, which is where I think Linux is genuinely excellent.
A Keychron V6 Max for typing on. Full size, how do you even type in IPs without a numpad? Srsly.
And I'm actually a big fand of vertical mice, cheapest I can find lol.
Writing code
IntelliJ. Jetbrains caught me with resharper and their IDE is just as good. Just the back and forth code navigation is enough for me to pay the ultimate license.
I don't get on with VS Code at all, I never managed to get it to work with any language in a way that I see more useful than a plain text editor. So why bother installing 20 plugins?
fish as a shell because its nice, cmux as a terminal because it lets me run 10 Claude Code instances in parallel without losing overview.
Yeah Claude Code really has become my daily driver now, it's my team of juniors dishing out code like there's no tomorrow. I go as far as to let it debug infrastructure and set up my homelab, in that regard I feel like its more flexible than AI IDEs like Cursor or Windsurf.
Hermes Agent lives in Telegram, and helps me actually use the services in my homelab to their full extend. It also allows my wife to fix things without having to learn how to use a terminal.
Languages
Kotlin and Java are home now. I still miss working with C# but Kotlin comes really close. Lucky for me, I can use it for everything now.
TypeScript/JavaScript for anything with a browser attached to it. Python only when I have to, which is more often than I'd choose unfortunately. Bash and HCL because infrastructure asks for them and there's no point resenting it.
Building and running things
Services
Spring Boot is the workhorse. It's a boring choice, but it works and I already know all possible failure modes. Next and React to quickly build performant UIs.
Platform
Kubernetes where the scale justifies it, K3s where it doesn't, OCI images power both. Argo for delivery, GitHub Actions for CI, Ansible for provisioning.
Network
Wireguard ultra since day one. Performance vs OpenVPN is 100:1. Now that Netbird exist we have the perfect management plane for it as well. What more is there to ask for? Feels underrated tbh.
Observability
Prometheus, Loki, Grafana. Simple, well understood. So glad I found Loki as an alternative to Elastic.
Hosting
AWS when money isn't a concern, Hetzner for anything carrying real load at a reasonable price. OVH when I need a cheap throwaway VPS.
Identity
Never got into Keycloak, Authentik stole my heart. Works as it should and also feels kinda underrated. Combination with Netbird is divine for every SMB admin.
Homelab
On some decade old NUCs I'm running: Arr Suite, Immich, Mealie, and a rotating cast of things I'm trying out. I'm not going to publish an inventory of what runs where but the interesting parts end up in posts eventually.