What I use day-to-day.
The setup I default to for cloud architecture, DevOps and writing. Not a manifesto — just what works for me.
Hardware
- MacBook Pro · Apple Silicon — primary daily driver
- External monitor — 4K, for the second pair of eyes
- Mechanical keyboard — tactile switches
Editor & terminal
- Claude Code — AI-assisted engineering harness for the heavy lifting
- VS Code — for visual reviews and quick edits
- iTerm2 + zsh with custom prompt and history-driven completion
- tmux for sessions across multiple environments
Cloud & infra tooling
- AWS CLI — preferred over the console for anything I do twice
- Terraform, CloudFormation, CDK — depending on the project's history
- Docker Desktop for local containers and DB instances
- k9s for quick Kubernetes triage when needed
Observability
- CloudWatch — first stop for AWS-native telemetry
- Datadog, Grafana — when the stack lives across clouds or data sources
- Sentry for app-level error tracking
Writing & PM
- Markdown everywhere — Obsidian for notes, plain MD in repos for docs
- Linear for issues and roadmap
- Notion for collaborative docs with non-engineers
- Excalidraw + Mermaid for architecture diagrams
Habits worth more than tools
- Take notes during incidents — it's much easier to remember at hour 2 than at hour 7
- Read post-mortems weekly, from other teams and other companies
- Always run a smoke test in staging before pushing to prod
- Write the runbook entry for any alarm I add, in the alarm description