SiteWriting

Things I'm using…

About ten years of buying random gadgets and software and slowly figuring out what actually stuck. This page is the short version: the hardware on my desk, the boring self-care stuff, and the dev stack I reach for without thinking.

None of this is sponsored or aspirational. It's just the stuff that made my day a little easier once I stopped chasing every new release.

Hardware

Laptops, phones, the messy desk in the photo, earbuds, watch. What actually gets used, not what looks good in a spec sheet.

Workspace desk setup with monitor and gear
Desk setup

Personal care

Skin picks that survived my bad experiments. Nothing fancy, just things that don't make my face angry.

Peripherals

Random bits: bike, polishing cloth, whatever didn't fit above.

Development

Editors, browser, a handful of AI tabs, terminal tools, and the design apps I open when I'm not just writing code. Honest list, not a resume keyword dump.

Editor & environment

  • Cursor

    Where I spend most of my typing. Jump around the repo, fix things inline, ask dumb questions out loud.

  • Baseline settings

    Format on save, strip trailing space, keep a newline at EOF. Indent is whatever the project already uses, usually two spaces.

  • Typography

    Geist Mono in the editor, Geist in the UI. Line height bumped a notch so my eyes don't hate me.

  • Product icons

    Whatever icon pack reads fastest at a glance. I swap sometimes; not religious about it.

  • Formatting & lint

    Let the machine handle spacing. I wire up whatever the repo expects and try not to fight it.

  • Themes

    Dark mode first. Catppuccin vibes or flat grays, and I match the OS when I remember to.

Browser

  • Zen Browser

    Firefox-based, vertical tabs, workspaces. Feels less noisy than Chrome for long sessions.

  • Extensions

    Small list on purpose. If something makes the bar crowded or the browser slow, I uninstall it.

  • Zen mods & tweaks

    Tighter layout, accent color, sidebar stuff. I add things, get bored, delete half of them.

  • Dev tooling in-browser

    React DevTools when I'm in React land, network tab when something won't load, resize mode when CSS fights me.

AI & assistants

  • Claude

    Good when I want something explained slowly or a draft that doesn't sound like a tweet thread.

  • Hugging Face

    Poking at open models, comparing checkpoints, sometimes running stuff in the browser. Rabbit hole friendly.

  • Perplexity

    When I want links back, not a confident paragraph with no sources.

  • Notebook LM

    Dump PDFs and notes in, get summaries and weird podcast versions. Surprisingly handy for studying.

  • Cursor / IDE agents

    Rename across files, scaffold tests, run commands from the sidebar. Still check the diff like a paranoid person.

CLI

  • git & GitHub CLI

    Push, PR, review, repeat. `gh` saves me from clicking through GitHub.

  • Package & runtime

    Bun or Node depending on mood and what broke last week. pnpm-style installs when the project cares.

  • Search & navigation

    Search code, find files, fuzzy pick. That's most of my terminal joy.

  • Shell polish

    Starship for a short prompt and a few aliases for commands I type fifty times a day.

Design & creativity

  • Figma

    Mockups, components, "what if this button lived here" experiments.

  • Adobe

    Photoshop and Lightroom for photos; Illustrator when I need vectors and patience.

  • OBS Studio

    Screen records, simple scenes, the occasional stream when I'm brave enough.

  • Excalidraw

    Rough diagrams that still look fine pasted into a doc or a PR.