About

About Me

Tools I Use

I tend to be less opinionated about developement tools than many others, and consequently, I use a little bit of everything. I’d like to think I can find something useful in just about about any piece of kit. Here’s a list of the main tools I enjoy using, and some thoughts on them.

Hardware

I fell in love with ThinkPads as a kid when my mom unboxed a brand new R51e. That was the first computer either of my parents had owned, and I still remember loving the aesthetic: so chunky, so black, so serious looking. It was imposing, something that was clearly meant for getting some work done. It ended up becoming my first computer and I ran it with an ExpressCard wireless adapter for quite a while. Naturally, I did my entire college degree on a ThinkPad X220 that I picked up on eBay with a broken back panel for $70. Today I use a P1 Gen 4 and an X1 Nano.

OS

Currently Ubuntu 24.04 out of convenience, but I’ve used pretty much everything. I used Arch for years, then Tumbleweed, Fedora periodically, and then installed Ubuntu and just never really felt the need to switch again. It just works. I have some gross GNOME configuration that makes it behave a bit more like I had i3 configured so I can still live mostly on the keyboard. I did end up testing an M2 MacBook Pro for a month or so a while back and I surprisingly enjoyed it. In the future I’d like to give Qubes a shot since I’ve heard good things about it.

Text Editors

  • Vim - Love it. Without a doubt one of the best pieces of software ever devised, I genuinely can’t imagine writing anything, code or prose, without it. I use a lightly customized install for quick and dirty edits on config files, remote systems, etc. I don’t do a ton of actual software development in Vim itself and I’ll talk some more about that in the next section. Rest assured however, if I could only choose one, it would be Vim.

  • Emacs - Yeah, I’m an evil-mode user. Emacs is awesome for many, many reasons, but the default bindings aren’t one of them. When I first learned Emacs, I actually did force myself to use a completely uncustomized install, and I didn’t hate the bindings by any means, but I just never felt as connected to the machine as I do with Vim. Technically, I used a customized version of Doom Emacs, becuase I think it’s a great blend of out-of-the-box functionality, without feeling like it tries to obfuscate the aspects that make Emacs so incredible. I did try VSCode for a year or so, as I can be pretty comfortable anywhere as long as Vim bindings are available, and I liked it, but the sheer malleability of Emacs keeps drawing me back.

AI Tools

I’m really not super big on these, but I will admit they have saved me time in the past, and I think they do contribute at least somewhat to my workflow. Since they’re such a new technology, I’m sure this will change rapidly, but here’s what I’ve been using as of October 2025.

  • Chat - As far as chatbots go, I still haven’t found anything that seems to work quite as well as ChatGPT.
  • Autocomplete - Much the same, for this I just use GitHub Copilot integrated into my Emacs. It can be distracting at times, so I occasionally find myself turning it off, but it does seem to offer solid suggestions much of the time, especially for the more menial aspects of writing code.
  • API Access - OpenRouter. Enough said.
  • Agents - My first foray into agentic coding was with Aidermacs (an Aider plugin for Emacs), but recently I’ve been testing Claude Code connected to OpenRouter with Claude Code Router. Claude Code is honestly pretty impressive, and its ability to run console commands, (try to) verify its work, and iterate with minimal handholding is pretty entertaining to play with. I definitely enjoy letting it crunch away and then inspecting what it spits out. I’m not quite sure about the extent to which I trust it yet, but I’ve been impressed so far.