Note:

There are so many things in tech that I use with hesitancy like:

  • AWS (thanks for making my egress / ingress fees >>> my compute rlly awesome)
  • Databases (think of the wasted CPU cycles)
  • NixOS (I really hate that it’s the best option for maintaining a clean setup)
  • much more…

That I want to list out the things I actually enjoy using.

List:

  • Helix. Not having to spend 8 hours configuring Helix is the best part about it. I don’t care that it doesn’t support terminals because I don’t have to sit in front of my coworkers like a freak explaining ‘oh i just need 8 hours to install my Nvim plugins’. Genuinely such a great thing to exist.
  • Victoria Logs / Metrics. If you use Loki or Prometheus you should just switch. It’s so easy to setup and performs so much better.
  • Devenv.sh on NixOS. I know there’s like a huge fanbase for NixOS, but the docs suck so so so much. All I want is to be able to isolate every projects toolchains from each other so I don’t deal with problems later. Surely NixOS is not the best iteration of this concept, but it’s what we have. Devenv.sh makes Nix be actually useable and I really appreciate the devs for making it.
  • Sqlite. Databases are so incredibly unnecessary until you start doing distributed computing. If you’re doing something that’s computationally easy and/or at low scale save yourself any headache and just use Sqlite.
  • Opus 4.5 is the smartest AI as of Dec 2025. It’s actually rlly good and has made my job so much easier.
  • ChatGPT Atlas. For the exclusive purpose of telling it to do all of my homework. I literally open my laptop on Fridays, then paste instructions for how to open canvas and do all of my online textbooks etc. and it literally just does it.
  • Rust Soychest! You should only use Rust if you’ve written in C++. Without that pre-requisite using Rust is like turning 21 and enjoying a 100 yr bottle of wine. It’s hard to motivate why it’s so much better unless you’ve tried an alternative. Although I still do think templates are superior to macros.
  • Chisel / SpinalHDL. Have you tried writing in SystemVerilog / VHDL?
  • K8S. In the big 2025, I still think K8S is the singlehandedly best technology for deploying anything at scale. I refuse to use Railway or Railway-esque services simply because K8S is just already user friendly, straight-forward, and feature-rich.
  • K9S. The only issue with K8S is the repetitive commands. K9S solves this and also saves me like min 5 hours / week whenever i’m doing infra shit. If i’m ever a billionaire i’m retiring the guy who made it.
  • Kalshi. Have you looked at Polymarket docs?
  • Svelte. So simple and so good.
  • Pixotine. I don’t use nictoine consitently but sometimes it’s nice to have on a sunny day when working. I think Nicotine toothpics are the penultimate iteration of nicotine administration and I think Pixotine is the best brand.