The Tools I Use Every Day

categories: tech, tools tags: dev, workflow excerpt: A rundown of my daily driver tools for development, infrastructure, and staying sane.

Every developer has their toolkit. Here’s mine — refined over years of trial, error, and strong opinions.

Editor

Cursor is my daily driver. VS Code foundation with AI that actually understands context. I’ve tried every editor — Vim, Emacs, Sublime, Nova — and keep coming back to the VS Code ecosystem.

Terminal

Ghostty replaced iTerm2 for me. It’s fast, GPU-accelerated, and the config is a single file. No preferences pane, no JSON sprawl. Just works.

Infrastructure

• k3s — Lightweight Kubernetes that doesn’t make you hate Kubernetes
• FluxCD — GitOps that stays out of your way
• Tailscale — VPN that makes networking feel like 2026 instead of 1996
• Proxmox — Hypervisor that runs everything and costs nothing

Monitoring

• Grafana — Dashboards for everything
• Prometheus — Metrics collection
• Loki — Log aggregation (new addition, love it so far)

The Philosophy

I optimize for fewer, better tools. Every tool in your stack is a dependency — something that can break, something you have to update, something you have to remember how to use.

The best tool is the one you don’t need. The second best is the one that does its job and gets out of the way.