My technologies of choice

Created 2021-06-22 · Updated 2021-07-10

This blog entry is expected to be very long. I tried to explain my opinion about every piece of technology. Those are what I'm using every day.

In any technology, performance, efficiency and security are three top focus points I would like to consider. I'm willing to give up convenience, beautiful, feature rich to achieve some of those goals.

Platform

When I talk about a platform, I mean hardware and operating system in combination to provide a base working environment.

Macbook M1 & MacOS

  • Daily working environment.
  • Good development environment and tools, consistent with other Unix-like system.
  • Good GUI.
  • Good built-in applications.
  • Security done right.
  • Good cloud integration.
  • The best hardware and software integration.
  • Very good performance.
  • The best trackpad.
  • Screen, keyboard, overall design are very good.
  • Long batter duration.

VPS & OpenBSD

  • Server environment.
  • No GUI, just text base interface.
  • Security focused.
  • Good old Unix tools.
  • Good built-in applications: relayd, httpd, acme-client...
  • Simple to manage and upgrade.

Daily usage

Window Tiling · Amethyst / Yabai

  • I needs these applications only for maximize the windows automatically, to focus on single task at a time.
  • Amethyst: easy to use.
  • Yabai: flexible, more control.

Browser · Safari / Firefox / Chrome

  • Safari: private use.
  • Firefox / Chrome: development.

Apple Notes

  • Personal task management.
  • Note taking.

Apple Calendar

  • Work meeting and schedule.
  • Person schedule and sharing with family.

Apple Dictionary

  • Quick lookup when writing.

Password Manager · MacPass / Enpass

  • Enpass: only for my wife because it's easy to use and sync with iCloud.
  • Macpass
    • KeePass format compatible.
    • Native implementation for MacOS.

Development

I'm a Web Developer, I mostly work with Java back-end and Angular/React front-end, I care about the Terminal and the performance of every tool that I use. That's why you will see I tried to eliminate unnecessary complexity.

Monospace Font · Fira Code

  • Monospace Font is very important because I'm looking at those character more than 8 hours/day, on terminal, text editor, IDE...
  • Very nice looking font.
  • Support ligature.

Apple Terminal

Shell · zsh

  • Bash compatible. Use zsh, you don't need to learn Bash at work again.
  • Work very well with: key-bindings.zsh (taken from oh-my-zsh project), zsh-autosuggestions, fzf.
  • Say no to plugin frameworks, they will let you down.
  • The final setup give me a fast shell, auto suggestions based on history, history fuzzy search.

SSH Agent · Sekey

  • Use built-in secure enclave to generate private/public key.
  • The private key will never expose to any party.
  • Use Touch ID for authentication.

Source code version control system · git

  • VCS is not something I could choose, because it's based on the project I'm working on. But I choose git whenever it's possible.
  • Best of its kind.
  • Best when using in shell.

Package Manager · MacPorts

  • Why MacPorts? Why not Homebrew? Because I'm old. I had worked with Portage on Gentoo, pacman on Archlinux. I found I'm home when I'm using MacPorts.
  • Most of command line tools are available.
  • Can build application from source code.

Simple Text Editor · vim / Sublime Text

vim

  • When working on shell.
  • Very good key bindings and features.
  • Keyboard focused.
  • Power user focused.
  • Built-in on most Unix-like system.

Sublime Text

  • Nice trial software.
  • Native implementation for MacOS.
  • Good GUI.
  • Good plugins.

IDE · IntelliJ and brothers

  • Best Java IDE.
  • Premium user experience.
  • Good plugins.
  • Good performance despite being built on Java Platform.
  • Why not Visual Studio Code? No thanks, the developers behind Visual Studio Code had done a great work, but I don't prefer WebApp when it's an application which I use everyday, every millisecond matter.