Tools I use
What I actually use.
Not an aspirational list. These are the things that are open right now, on the machine I am typing this on.
Machine
- MacBook Pro
- Apple Silicon. The reason I can build and notarise universal binaries locally.
- External display
- One screen for the terminal, one for everything else.
Editor and terminal
- VS Code
- With Vim keybindings. I have tried to leave and keep coming back.
- iTerm2 + zsh
- Split panes, one per environment. Colour-coded so prod looks different from staging.
- k9s
- Faster than kubectl for the ninety percent of cluster work that is just looking at things.
Infrastructure
The things open on my second screen most days.
- AWS Console + CLI
- EKS, ECS, RDS, S3, CloudFront, IAM.
- Terraform
- Everything, including the things we swore we would only do once.
- ArgoCD
- GitOps delivery. A bad release is one reverted commit.
- Grafana + Prometheus
- Alerts tuned so a page means a human has to act.
Building
- Node.js + Express
- Most of the backends I write.
- Next.js + React
- Including this site.
- NestJS + Prisma
- The API behind my own product. Fastify adapter, PostgreSQL, Redis.
- Flutter
- The mobile side of it. One codebase, both stores.
- Postman
- For the APIs I did not write.
Shipping
- Xcode Cloud
- iOS builds on tag, straight to TestFlight.
- App Store Connect
- Certificates, provisioning profiles, review submissions.
- Google Play Console
- Signed AABs and staged rollouts.
- notarytool
- macOS notarisation, stapled before the DMG ships.
Nothing here is a recommendation. It is what survived four years of actually having to fix things at odd hours. If you want to know why I dropped something, ask me. deepboda18@gmail.com