Uses

A running list of what I reach for day to day. The climbing version lives on the gear page; this is the same idea for the desk. Bracketed items are still being filled in.

Machine & desk

• Laptop: [your Mac: model / year]
• Display: [external monitor]
• Keyboard: [keyboard]
• Pointer: [mouse / trackpad]

Shell & terminal

• Shell: zsh with oh-my-zsh and the Powerlevel10k theme
• Version managers: nvm for Node, pyenv for Python
• Terminal: [your terminal emulator]
• Dotfiles: kept in git: see dotfiles worth keeping

Editor & AI

• Editor: [your editor]
• AI pair: Claude Code, in the terminal
• Notes & writing: Obsidian (this whole site publishes from an Obsidian vault)

Languages

• Python: automation, tooling, REST services
• Go: CSI providers, performance-sensitive tooling
• Bash: glue, provisioning, CI steps
• Groovy: Jenkins pipelines

Cloud & infrastructure

• Clouds: AWS (primary), GCP, Azure
• Orchestration: Kubernetes / EKS, Helm, Karpenter, Docker
• Infra as code: Terraform, Ansible, Packer

Secrets & identity

• HashiCorp Vault: PKI, JWT/OIDC, Kubernetes auth, AWS secrets engine
• Consul: service mesh, mTLS
• AWS IAM / IRSA: workload identity, no static credentials

CI/CD

• GitHub Actions: ARC runner scale sets
• Jenkins, GitLab CI
• Argo Workflows, SonarQube, Artifactory

Observability

• Datadog: APM, dashboards, monitors
• Prometheus, Grafana, Splunk