What I work with, and why. The list stays short on purpose, and the notes are honest.
Got it in 2025. My first laptop, full stop — went straight from desktop to an M-series and skipped a generation of compromises. The 48GB / M4 Pro spec was overkill on paper and exactly right in practice: Docker running a Kafka cluster, two Spring services, and Postgres locally without breaking a sweat. Worth every sol.
Switched from a gaming board with RGB everywhere to something that actually works on macOS out of the box — proper Cmd/Option keys, no software required. The 75% layout keeps arrows and the function row without eating the desk, and the switches are the right balance for someone who codes more than they game.
The mouse every other engineer also has. Hand-shaped in a way that matters after eight hours, charge lasts the better part of a month, and the horizontal scroll wheel pays for itself the first time you're navigating a wide spreadsheet or a long line in code. No reason to fight the consensus on this one.
My main display. The real estate is the whole point — I keep three or four windows side-by-side without alt-tabbing, and macOS Spaces handles the rest. The spec felt overkill on day one and exactly right by month two.
27" sidekick to the right of the Odyssey, on a separate arm. Always running terminal, Teams, and a Claude window — the stuff that needs to be visible but doesn't need my attention. Cheap, fast enough, doesn't pretend to be more than it is.
Bought them for one reason: my street is loud, and the ANC is the only thing that makes long focus blocks possible. Sound quality is good enough for music between calls, but I don't kid myself — these are work tools, not audiophile gear. Battery lasts a workweek, which is what matters.
Bought it in 2024 as my first real flagship purchase. Two years in and the spec is honestly more phone than I need — 512GB of storage I haven't filled past 128, 12GB of RAM that doesn't blink at anything I throw at it. I'll probably still be carrying it in 2028.
The newest addition to the desk, and it's already shifted my habits — most of my reading at home happens here now, not on the Kindle. Beautiful 13" display, ridiculous battery, runs anything I'd want a tablet to run. Probably overkill for what I actually do with it, which is mostly YouTube and Netflix in the evening, but I don't regret it.
Came from the default macOS Terminal. iTerm2 kept the essence — it doesn't try to reinvent what a terminal is — but added the parts I started missing: split panes, search-in-buffer, profiles per project. I'm not the kind of person who picks a terminal for vibes; I picked the one that didn't make me relearn anything.
Open it when I want AI in the loop — writing a shell script from scratch, exploring a CLI I haven't touched before, anything where I'd otherwise be tabbing back and forth to ChatGPT. Block-based history is too much for daily git work, but for "figure this out as I go" sessions, it earns its slot.
For serious work — Java, Python, Go, JavaScript, SQL. Almost every project I've built has lived in IntelliJ, PyCharm, GoLand, or WebStorm. I like having one mental model that works the same across languages: same shortcuts, same refactoring, same debugger. No-brainer.
For quick inspection — opening a log file, scratching a snippet, editing markdown or YAML, anything where launching IntelliJ would be overkill. Lighter weight, faster startup, no project setup. The VS Code half of the JetBrains/VS Code split.
Where everything goes — meeting notes, paper summaries from the NLP group, half-formed blog drafts, security checklists for work. Plain Markdown files in a folder I sync myself, no vendor lock-in. The graph view is fun; the daily-notes habit is what actually makes it stick.
Replaced Spotlight on day one and now I can't go back. Window management, clipboard history, snippets, quick calculator, the AI command. Half the muscle memory I have on this Mac runs through Cmd+Space.
The home reading machine until the iPad arrived. Now it's the travel reader — small, light, weeks of battery, and an e-ink screen that doesn't burn my eyes after a long screen day. Different tool for a different mode of reading.
DNS, domain management, and edge hosting for this site. The free tier is more than enough for personal use, and the dashboard doesn't fight me.
Code host since the beginning. Public projects, private projects, this site, every experiment I've ever pushed. Hard to imagine version control without it at this point.
Where I poke at unfamiliar services and run the occasional real project. EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS — mostly to learn, sometimes to build. The console is overwhelming on purpose, but once you know what you're looking for, the depth is the point.
Droplets, Spaces, and managed Postgres for personal projects — anything where AWS would be 30 minutes of IAM and VPC setup just to run a script. The dashboard tells me what something costs before I provision it. That's the whole pitch.