What I Use

Editor & Coding

• Claude Code

  My daily driver. AI coding agent that lives in the terminal and reads the whole repo. Half of what I ship goes through it now.

• VS Code

  General-purpose editor for web and scripting work. Light, fast, well-extended.

• IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate

  For anything Spring Boot or heavy JVM work. The refactoring tools alone make it worth the license.

• Xcode

  For iOS work. I'm not in love with it, but SwiftUI previews and the simulator make it unavoidable.

• Android Studio

  For Android work. Same story as Xcode: not a choice, just the right tool.

Languages

• Java

  Spring Boot 4 daily. Where the bulk of the backend work happens.

• Kotlin

  Android, occasionally server-side. Friendly enough that it's hard to go back to plain Java for anything new.

• Swift

  iOS. SwiftUI for new screens, UIKit when I have to reach into legacy code.

• TypeScript

  For web and tooling. Plain JavaScript only when a script absolutely has to ship without a build step.

• SQL (PostgreSQL flavor)

  Written by hand more than people assume. The query planner is a colleague.

Frameworks

• Spring Boot 4

  Default for any new backend. I've written enough about its sharp edges that I keep the knife by the handle now.

• SwiftUI

  Default for new iOS UI. Reach for UIKit only when SwiftUI can't do the thing.

• Jetpack Compose

  Default for new Android UI. Same philosophy as SwiftUI: declarative first, imperative only when forced.

Database

• PostgreSQL

  The only one. Boring, mature, has every feature a sane app needs. JSONB when relational pretends to be tired, partitioning when the table actually is.

Browser

• Chrome

  Primary. DevTools is still the best in the business.

• Brave

  Secondary. Personal browsing, ad-blocked by default, separate cookie jar.

Hardware

• MacBook Pro M1 (2021)

  32 GB RAM. Still does everything I need four years in. Battery is the only thing I notice has aged.

• Samsung 49" ultrawide

  One monitor, two virtual halves. Editor on the left, browser or terminal on the right. Bought it once, can't go back.

• Logitech MX Master 3

  Mouse. The horizontal scroll wheel is undersold and the side gestures are how I tab between desktops.

• Logitech MX Keys

  Keyboard. Pairs over Logi Bolt with the MX Master 3. Quiet, low-profile, lit just enough to type in the dark.

• Apple AirPods

  For calls and music. Not the audiophile choice, but they pair instantly and the noise cancellation is enough.

AI Tools

• Claude (Anthropic)

  Claude Code in the terminal, Claude on the web for prose work, Claude API for anything I'm building. I've written about why I picked this one.

Notes & Productivity

• Notion

  Long-form notes, project plans, book outlines. The MCP server makes it part of my coding loop now.

• OneNote

  Work meeting notes. Lower friction than Notion for fast capture during a call.

Cloud & Hosting

• AWS

  For most application hosting. EC2, RDS, S3, the usual suspects.

• Cloudflare

  DNS, CDN, edge. Sits in front of everything personal, including this site.

Monitoring & Observability

• Grafana

  Where I look first when something is wrong. Dashboards for every service that matters.

• Prometheus

  The metrics backend. Paired with Grafana, it's the boring-and-reliable choice.

Books On the Desk

• None right now

  I read on Kindle and on my phone. Nothing physical sits on the desk. If you're after my own books, the books page has them all.