Tools I Use to Live My Glamorous Life

2024-12-14 uses

Development

I am primarily a Python expert (25 years!)
I am primarily a FastAPI user, and I am better than average at doing async programming (which sucks and is bad, but it’s fun to do bad things)
I primarily choose Postgres as my database
I do most of my personal dev projects in Go
If you ask me to write something in C++ I will say no but I will write C++ to spite you
I prefer Linux on the desktop to Mac on the desktop at this point
- I do not value my time or sanity
- If something is reliable, I get bored and self-destructive so I need to be in a state of crisis in all aspects of my life and a Linux desktop fills that need in this space
I usually prefer Debian stable or one of its relatives for servers and Alpine for container base images
I use Tailwind at home, Sass at work
I use Solid and plain old JS at home, React at work
I use Ollama on Mac and Linux to locally run LLMs

My muscle memory is Vim, I use it everywhere
Most of my polyglot development is via VS Code
- I use LLMs for developing code signficiantly less than other people on the cutting edge of tech. I have the Continue plugin installed at home against local Ollama but use its features quite sparingly.
I am forcing myself to use Zed more too, just because monocultures are a Bad Idea and VSC is a monoculture now
I like using Ebitengine to make silly 2D games
I also (rarely) play around with Picotron, Pico-8, TIC-80 and LÖVE for the same

Here is the bootstrap set of dotfiles I use on new computers
I use zsh and bash almost equally, though I think I have more zsh machines now
I usually start out with oh-my-zsh or oh-my-bash on new systems
I use nvm, pyenv and rbenv to manage node/python/ruby installs
I use grep, rg and ag in descending order of frequency
I like git-delta for command line diffing
I like lazygit for some easy to explain but harder to do than necessary git operations. Sometimes a GUI (or a TUI) is nice! Not everythnig has to be commands or code!

I always add ~/.local/bin and ~/bin/ to my $PATH so I can manage my own binaries without superuser perms
I download VS Code and Go (setting $GOPATH to ~/.go) from tarballs and manage them myself, adding ~/go/bin and ~/VSCode-linux-x64/bin to $PATH – that way I don’t need to deal with native packages or elevated install permissions
Same with Deno
Currently in ~/bin: btm slirp4netns¹ tmux tic80 (static binaries acquired from their release pages)

The theme for this weblog is a fork of smol, built in Hugo
Hosted on Github Pages through the magic of a CNAME.
Fonts: I’m using Atkinson Hyperlegible, Inter and 0xProto (hosted here and not on Google Fonts).

Monodraw for cool text-mode diagrams
Xara Photo and Graphic Designer as I have muscle memory and it’s fast to make drawings in
The Gimp for quick raster touchups
Inkscape to touch up SVGs
D2 for diagrams as code – I like it in terms of how clean the language looks, how clean the output looks, and how easy it is to use
Mermaid for diagrams extensively because it’s everywhere, mark a code block as mermaid in markdown and you get the rendering for free in things like Obsidian and on Github
Graphviz comes along for the party, too – it’s old but it gets the job done for a large range of jobs

I have a handful of computers I use regularly!

An older Legion desktop running Nobara for gaming and general computing
Pinebook Pro running Manjaro for remote terminal stuff and as a lightweight Miniflux client
AOKZOE A1 running ChimeraOS for handheld PC gaming, also using its Gnome desktop as a portable development setup
Whatever the smallest iPhone is on the market at the time for doomscrolling

This is missing in ChimeraOS for some reason and the only part absent from a working podman setup on my handheld ↩︎