Tech Stack & What I Use#

Consider this a continously-updated list of the tools, apps, and hardware I use for my work and personal projects.

Tech#

I’m a Mac fanboy, so this is being typed on a Mac mini. When traveling a compact MacBook Air accompanies me.

Software#

Most of the current projects are written in Javascript (Node.js - with an eye on Bun) (still want/ need to learn Rust or Go. For frontend stuff I like using Vue.js along with Vite for bundling.

For code editing/ IDE I’m currently trying to switch over to Zed, a new Rust-based super fast code editor. For features that they don’t support (yet), I still use Visual Studio Code.

Raycast is a super helpful tool for Mac, which I use for quick access to all kinds of things. The plugin to search NPM or Can I Use are must-haves. The GitHub plugin also saves a lot of time.

For Browsers I mostly use Arc, a customizable Chromium browser on desktop and Safari on mobile.

Search on all browsers has been replaced by DuckDuckGo. I like their privacy policy and the search results are less cluttered and cleaner. Toggling location-based search results is also a nice feature.

When understanding or searching for more than just a link or tool Perplexity has been a fantastic tool. It’s a search engine that understands natural language and can answer questions in a more human way (with links and credits for the results).

1Password, Figma, Affinity, Warp CLI, Apple Music, mymind, Proton (both Mail and VPN) are also frequent daily apps.

Obsidian is a fantastic tool to organize notes and thoughts in Markdown. I like their approach over Notion, since files are local (and therefore owned!) and can easily be transferred or synced.

After the shutdown of Tweetbot (rest in peace), I switched over to Ivory and my own Mastodon instance beoriginal.social.

Work and development-wise I’m a big fan of Scaleway, with their EU-based public cloud platform. For all the other stuff Google Cloud Platform and AWS are the usual options. CDN is mostly Bunny or Fastly. Terraform is great to make infrastructure reproducible and abstract bad cloud UIs.

Monitoring tech deployments works best with Datadog and Better Uptime.

Principles#

For SWR Audio Lab we also wrote a set of Engineering Principles to guide our development work and decisions.

EDC#

Stuff that I also always carry with me (besides iPhone and the usual stuff) include a [Whoop] fitness and recovery tracker, a pair of AirPods Pro, a Leatherman multitool, and Freitag wallet.

Podcasts#

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Some of my favorites are:

• Kraig Adams, behind the scenes talks from Kraig around his solo-hiking adventures – Apple Podcasts / Spotify
• The Josh Lynott Project, an Australian runner talking about sports and personal development – Apple Podcasts / Website
• Life and Lessions by Sean Spooner, talks and solo episodes of the weekly life lessons from building a business – Apple Podcasts / Website
• Lenny’s Podcast, great interviews with interesting people in the tech world – Apple Podcasts
• Gefühlte Fakten, very funny German-speaking duo of writers from known TV shows and book – Apple Podcasts / Website
• Whoop Podcast, great talks and health insights from the makers of the wearable fitness and recovery tracker – Apple Podcasts / Spotify
• Kriss Kross Amsterdam, great DJ mixes from the Dutch trio – Apple Podcasts

Do you have more great recommendations? Please let me know!

This Website#

While switching over from Jekyll to Hugo, I also rewrote most of it to make it as minimal and fast as possible. Most pages are written in pure Markdown with custom attributes. The layout is some bare-bones HTML structure with custom elements for pages and the blog.

The style is based on Tailwind CSS, with some pre-processing to bundle the Inter font using Vite. The final static assets are served through Bunny CDN. The source code is publicly hosted on GitHub.

Kudos#

This page is heavily inspired by manuelmoreale.com/uses and others [1] [2].