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. Which is convenient, because:
Machine
macOS, and I'm not defensive about it. It's the best operating system I've used: like Linux but usable. 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, because I use the numpad and refuse to feel bad about it.
Writing code
IntelliJ. Fifteen years in the JVM will do that. The refactoring tools are still ahead of everything else, and I've never found the argument for giving them up compelling.
I don't get on with VS Code. That's a preference, not a position.
fish as a shell, cmux as a terminal — the Ghostty-based one built for running coding agents in parallel, which is exactly the problem I had.
Claude Code and Hermes run daily, not experimentally. Hermes lives in Telegram, which turns out to be the right interface for most homelab chores.
Languages
Kotlin and Java are home. Kotlin is the C# of the Java world, which is meant as a compliment and probably explains why I ended up there after starting out in C#.
TypeScript and JavaScript for anything with a browser attached to it. Bash and HCL because infrastructure asks for them and there's no point resenting it. Python when I have to, which is more often than I'd choose.
Building and running things
Services
Spring Boot for anything that has to be correct under load. It's a boring choice, and boring is the entire point when something needs to stay up. Next and React when there has to be a frontend.
Runtime
Kubernetes where the scale justifies it, K3s where it doesn't, Docker underneath both. Argo for delivery, GitHub Actions for CI, Ansible for the machines themselves.
Data
Postgres, and rarely anything else. Most problems people reach for a second database to solve are Postgres problems with a configuration answer.
Watching it
Prometheus, Loki, Grafana. Unfashionable, well understood, and I can debug the monitoring itself at three in the morning.
Hosting
Hetzner for anything carrying real load. Moving off a PaaS onto it is one of the higher-leverage things I've done recently — cheaper, faster, and I get to see the disks.
Cloud
AWS when a project genuinely needs a hyperscaler and the managed services earn their margin. OVH in France when all I need is a cheap VPS and nothing more.
Homelab
Authentik for identity, Netbird for the network. Both are better than their visibility in the space suggests, and both have posts owed to them.
Beyond that: 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.