Tech Stack & What I Use

Consider this a continously-updated list of the tools, apps, and hardware I use for my work and personal projects.

Photo collection of computers

Tech

I’m a Mac fanboy, so this is being typed on a Mac mini. When traveling a compact MacBook Air accompanies me.

Software

Most of the current projects are written in Javascript/ Typescript (running on Node.js, Bun, or Deno). Currently also very interested and learning the ins and outs of Rust and Go. For frontend stuff I like using Vue.js along with Vite for bundling.

For code editing/ IDE I’m currently very happy with Visual Studio Code and my own color theme.

Raycast is a super helpful tool for Mac, which I use for quick access to all kinds of things. The plugin to search NPM or Can I Use are must-haves. The GitHub plugin also saves a lot of time.

For Browsers I mostly use Arc, a customizable Chromium browser on desktop and Safari on mobile.

Search on all browsers has been replaced by DuckDuckGo. I like their privacy policy and the search results are less cluttered and cleaner. Toggling location-based search results is also a nice feature.

When understanding or searching for more than just a link or tool Perplexity has been a fantastic tool. It’s a search engine that understands natural language and can answer questions in a more human way (with links and credits for the results).

1Password, Figma, Affinity, Warp CLI, Apple Music, mymind, Proton (both Mail and VPN) are also frequent daily apps.

Obsidian is a fantastic tool to organize notes and thoughts in Markdown. I like their approach over Notion, since files are local (and therefore owned!) and can easily be transferred or synced.

After the shutdown of Tweetbot (rest in peace), I switched over to Ivory and my own Mastodon instance beoriginal.social.

Work and development-wise I’m a big fan of Scaleway, with their EU-based public cloud platform. For some applications fly.io is also a great choice. For all the other stuff Google Cloud Platform and AWS are the usual options. CDN is mostly Bunny or Fastly. Terraform is great to make infrastructure reproducible and abstract bad cloud UIs.

Monitoring tech deployments works best with Datadog and Better Uptime.

dns0.eu is currently my go-to European public DNS provider.

Principles

For SWR Audio Lab we also wrote a set of Engineering Principles to guide our development work and decisions.

EDC

Stuff that I also always carry with me (besides iPhone and the usual stuff) include a [Whoop] fitness and recovery tracker, a pair of AirPods Pro, a Leatherman multitool, and Freitag wallet.

Podcasts

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Some of my favorites are:

Do you have more great recommendations? Please let me know!

This Website

I migrated the site from Hugo to Astro, keeping it as minimal and fast as possible. Content is written in plain Markdown with custom remark/rehype plugins for sibling links, image transforms, and shortcode-like markup. The layout is a small set of components in src/components and src/layouts, generated statically into HTML.

The style is based on Tailwind CSS v4 with the Geist sans typeface loaded as an npm package and wired through a CSS @font-face rule. The final static assets are served through Bunny CDN. The source code is publicly hosted on Tangled.

Kudos

This page is heavily inspired by manuelmoreale.com/uses and others [1] [2].