My Tech Stack - 2025 Edition

  • 9th Feb 2025
  • 3 min read
  • Updated on 9th Feb 2025

Photo of desk with laptop and PC

First, the hardware

  • Work Laptop: 16" Macbook Pro M1 Pro
  • Home PC: Custom mini-itx desktop running Fedora Silverblue
  • Keyboard: Nuphy Air75 V2
  • Mouse: Razer Pro Click Mini
  • Mic: Blue Yeti Nano
  • Webcam: Razer Kiyo Pro

Second, the software

Amethyst

This is probably my most essential piece of software. As you would assume from reading my i3wm blogpost, having a decent tiling window manager is essential for me. This amazing piece of open-source software works perfectly well for me, emulating most things that I was already used to before using macOS.

VSCode

This one is a bit of an odd one for me. I've been going back and forth between the Jetbrains IDEs and VSCode for many years at this point. While generally finding the Jetbrains experience more polished (e.g. running Go table test cases individually), at some point last year the debugger just stopped working altogether with an update for me and my team, which made me switch over.

TablePlus

As someone who browses databases almost every day and is a sucker for a simple, clean UI, TablePlus is the perfect database client for me. Aside from that, the absolute killer feature is the "Safe-Mode", which, when enabled, asks for your password (the fingerprint sensor works on Mac as well) for every written operation.

Podman

As this has become the default already on Fedora, I figured I could also give it a try on the Macbook. And well, it just works and it's free. Nothing much else to add here to be honest.

Firefox

I have to admit, this is probably one of the pieces of software where I've become a bit old-school and resistant to change. I really don't need much from my browser. Pinned tabs, bookmarks and a healthy dose of privacy. That being said, I do really like the UX of the Arc Browser, but the project seems to already have been abandoned by its creators. Perhaps the Zen Browser will become the perfect mix of the two.

Duck Goes AI

While not being the hugest advocate of the AI/LLM trend, I found the frontend of Duckduckgo to be great. No log-in requirement, a selection of different language models and the promise of some privacy are everything I really need at this point. I'm sure I'll also use GitHub's Copilot more and more as well, but since last year has been the year of learning Go for me, I figured it's smarter to type your own code for a while until reaching a certain proficiency.

Mos

Last but not least, this little utility is a live saver for me. For whatever reason, you cannot have a different scroll direction for your trackpad and mouse in the macOS settings. Thanks to this tool, however, I have a peace of mind and don't need to flip settings whenever switching to the mouse inputs.