What I work with

MacBook Pro M4 Pro · 48GB · 512GB

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.

NuPhy Halo 75 Mechanical keyboard

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.

Logitech MX Master 3S Wireless mouse

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.

Samsung Odyssey 32" · 4K · 120Hz

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.

MSI 27" · sidekick

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.

Sennheiser Momentum 4 Wireless headphones

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.

Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra Daily phone

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.

iPad Pro M5 13"

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.

iTerm2 Primary terminal

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.

Warp Secondary terminal

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.

herdr Agent multiplexer

A terminal multiplexer built as a runtime for AI coding agents — where agent sessions run, instead of being scattered across terminal tabs.

JetBrains Suite IDE

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.

VS Code Editor

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.

Neovim Quick edits

For pinpoint changes: one edit, right there in the terminal, without opening an editor window.

lnav Log viewer

For quick log analysis. It recognizes common log formats on its own, so I can open a file and start filtering and searching right away.

Obsidian Notes & knowledge base

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.

Raycast Launcher & productivity

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.

Kindle Paperwhite Travel e-reader

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.

GitHub Code host

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.

AWS Hosting · compute · storage

This site lives here: S3 and CloudFront, with the domain and DNS on Route 53, deployed from GitHub Actions. Beyond that, it's 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.

DigitalOcean Hosting

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.