What I use daily

Desk

One fixed workspace, chosen so that nothing needs thinking about again after it is bought.

Machine

Custom build · AMD Ryzen 9 9950X (16 cores / 32 threads) · 64 GB DDR5-6000

Sixteen cores were chosen not for one fast build but so a type-check, a dev server, a database container, and a browser under profiling can all be alive at once without any of them waiting on another. 64 GB is what stopped me closing windows to free memory.

Graphics

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super

Drives two 4K panels at once and takes over encoding while recording a demo, so capture does not eat the cores a build is using.

Storage

2 TB Gen4 NVMe · 4 TB NVMe

The fast one for the system and active repositories, the large one for project archives and container images. Split so that “disk is full” never becomes a reason to postpone something.

Displays

2× 27" 4K, one mounted vertically

The landscape one fits an editor and a browser side by side at a type size that does not strain; the vertical one holds logs, diffs, and long documents — three things whose natural shape is tall, not wide.

Keyboard

Keychron Q1 Pro · Gateron Jupiter Brown, PBT keycaps

Aluminium body and a gasket mount, so it sounds low and does not carry on a video call. The layout is programmed on the board itself, not through an app that has to keep running in the background.

Mouse

Logitech MX Master 3S

Its horizontal wheel gets used daily on wide tables, timelines, and diffs that run off the side of the screen.

Audio

Sony WH-1000XM5

The noise cancelling is what makes working in a loud room possible at all. Worn without music more often than with it.

Microphone

Shure MV7

Client calls are the part of the work most often ruined by something trivial. A clear microphone removes the single most wasteful sentence in any meeting: “sorry, you cut out — could you repeat that?”

Chair

Herman Miller Aeron

The largest expense at this desk and the only one never regretted. It is used for longer hours than the machine, and it will outlast it too.

Desk

Standing desk, motorised height

Not for standing all day — but so that changing position does not require a decision. A button that takes two seconds gets pressed; an adjustment that takes two minutes never does.

Second machines

What gets used when the work cannot wait until I am back at the desk — and when the main machine is the wrong place to check something.

Laptop

MacBook Pro 14" · M4 Pro · 24 GB

Not merely a spare. Safari and macOS cannot be tested from Windows, and both are the most frequent source of bugs that never appear on the main machine. This one catches them before a client does.

Test devices

An iPhone · one mid-range Android

The Android is deliberately not a flagship. Fast devices hide a heavy page until it reaches someone whose device is not fast — and in Indonesia that is most visitors. Every page I hand over has been opened on both of these first, over mobile data rather than home Wi-Fi.

Tablet

iPad Air · Apple Pencil

Used to reread designs and mark up revisions away from the editor. Judging a layout on a device I cannot edit from makes me read it like a user rather than its author.

Environment

System

Windows 11 Pro

Shell

PowerShell day to day, WSL2 when POSIX is needed

Two shells with a clear border: PowerShell handles anything touching Windows itself, WSL2 handles scripts that will later run on a Linux server. Running a deploy script in an environment unlike its destination is the easiest way to find a bug in the most expensive place.

Runtime

Node.js · npm · fnm to pin a version per project

The version is declared inside the project and switches itself the moment I enter the folder. Running a client's code on a runtime unlike their server produces bugs that only appear after release — the most expensive place to find one.

Editor

Cursor

A VS Code fork, so the extensions and keybindings carry over exactly — moving here demanded relearning nothing.

Terminal

Windows Terminal · WSL2 (Ubuntu)

One window holds a PowerShell tab and an Ubuntu tab side by side, so moving between them does not break the flow. Project files stay on the Linux side — keeping them across the filesystem boundary is the most common reason WSL feels slow, and people usually blame WSL for it.

Typeface

JetBrains Mono

Chosen because a zero and a capital O, and a one and a lowercase l, never get confused. Rereading an API key with one wrong character is how you lose half an hour to a mistake that never needed to happen.

Workflow

The part that does not show up in a screenshot, and the part that decides whether a project can still be picked up a year later — by me or by someone else.

Version control

Git · linear history, commit messages that explain the reason

Rebase rather than merge, so the history reads as a record of changes and not a log of saves. Commit messages answer why, not what — the what is already in the diff, and the why lives only in the author's head until it is written down.

Code quality

TypeScript strict · ESLint · Prettier, run before every commit

Not personal discipline but a hook that refuses the commit. A rule that depends on remembering gets broken on exactly the busiest day — the same day the most expensive mistakes are made.

Testing

Playwright for critical flows, Vitest for logic

Not chasing a coverage percentage. What gets tested is the path where breakage means lost money or lost data — sign-up, payment, and export. The rest is tested by reading it.

Supporting services

Docker · database versions matched to production

Each project's database and queue run in containers on exactly the versions its server uses. After that, “it works on my machine” stops being a sentence anyone can use.

API client

Bruno

Its request collections are plain files inside the repository rather than the contents of an account on someone's cloud. They get reviewed, they get versioned, and they outlive anyone's subscription.

Database client

TablePlus

Chasing a bug by looking at the actual rows is almost always faster than inferring it from logs. Connections to production databases are saved read-only.

Secrets & credentials

1Password

Client credentials never sit in a plain text file, a chat history, or an .env that gets sent along. At handover, ownership is transferred rather than copied — so my access actually ends instead of merely going unused.

Notes

Obsidian · plain Markdown files

Each project's notes are files on disk, not rows in a service that may one day shut down. Decisions recorded when they are made are the only way to answer “why was it built like this” two years later.

Home server

Runs at home around the clock, with not a single port forwarded to the internet.

Machine

Custom build · Ryzen 7 5700X · 64 GB ECC · line-interactive UPS

ECC was chosen because this machine holds the only copy of some things, and memory that is quietly wrong is the kind of damage that shows up in no log at all. The UPS is not there to keep working through an outage but to shut down cleanly — a brief power cut is the most common way a ZFS pool gets corrupted.

Hypervisor

Proxmox VE

Every service sits in its own container or VM, with a snapshot taken before each change. Undoing a failed upgrade becomes a one-minute job instead of an all-nighter.

Storage

ZFS · 4× 8 TB RAIDZ1 · NVMe cache

RAIDZ1 survives one dead disk with nothing lost. More importantly, ZFS checksums catch bits that flip quietly — the kind of damage ordinary RAID diligently copies to its mirror.

Backups

Restic to object storage · 3-2-1 rule

RAID is not a backup. What actually saves you is not a second disk in the same box but a copy outside the house that does not vanish along with everything else when I mistype one command.

Network

2.5GbE · separate VLAN for IoT devices

Cheap smart devices are the weakest part of any home network and the least often updated. They sit on their own VLAN and cannot see a single machine that matters.

Remote access

Tailscale (WireGuard)

No ports are forwarded from the router and this server has no public address — so there is nothing to scan. Exposing an admin panel to the internet for convenience is a mistake that only needs to happen once.

What runs on it

Repository mirrors, a CI runner, a staging environment, a photo archive, and internal notes

Staging running here means a client can see and approve a change before a single line touches production. The repository mirrors exist so work does not stop when a third-party service is down.

Running this site

All of it is checkable from outside — through this site's headers or the domain's DNS records.

Hosting

Vercel

Deploys from a push to main, static pages revalidated hourly — no server to babysit.

Domain

Jagoan Hosting, nameservers on Vercel

Registrar and DNS kept apart on purpose: certificates and site records follow the deploy, while owning the domain does not depend on the host.

Inbound mail

ImprovMX

Forwarding, not a mailbox. An address on my own domain without one more inbox to maintain.

Outbound mail

Resend

Used by the contact form. SPF and DMARC are in place, so what it sends does not land in spam.

Data

Upstash Redis

Read counter and form rate limiting. The only state this site keeps.

Code

GitHub

Also the source of the activity figures on the home page and /now — pulled through the API, not retyped.