Uses

The working setup

Tools are not identity. They are the current answers to recurring problems, and each one has to earn its place.

—Operating system

Arch LinuxEssential

Daily driver. Rolling release, and I like knowing what is installed and why.

DebianEssential

What I put on servers when the choice is mine. Boring is the feature.

RHEL

Where the compliance requirements point at it.

—Design

Excalidraw

Thinking diagrams. Deliberately rough so nobody mistakes them for specifications.

Figma

Where this site was laid out before any CSS existed.

—Delivery

GitHub ActionsEssential

Default CI. Digest-pinned image builds.

Argo CD

Declarative cluster state reconciled from Git.

WranglerEssential

Everything Cloudflare, including this site and its D1 migrations.

—Editor

NeovimEssential

Primary editor. Configured minimally enough that I can rebuild it from memory.

VS Code

For anything involving a lot of TypeScript, and for pairing.

—Observability

PrometheusEssential

Metrics. Including model version as a label.

GrafanaEssential

Dashboards that pair service and model layers on one axis.

—Languages

PythonEssential

Pipelines, inference services, automation.

TypeScriptEssential

Workers, tooling, this site.

BashEssential

Still the fastest way to answer a question about a host.

—Infrastructure

TerraformEssential

Provisioning. Composable modules, remote state with locking.

AnsibleEssential

Configuration. Not a Terraform substitute, and vice versa.

DockerEssential

The packaging unit for everything.

K3sEssential

Small clusters where I do not need a managed control plane.

Helm

So an environment difference is a values file.

kind

Local clusters and CI test harnesses.

—Terminal

tmuxEssential

Sessions that survive a dropped connection.

ripgrepEssential

Search. Fast enough that I stopped thinking about search.

fzf

Fuzzy selection over everything, mostly history and files.

jqEssential

Non-negotiable once you work with cloud APIs.

k9s

Reading cluster state without typing kubectl forty times.