Last updated: 03 Jan, 2025

Hardware
Operating System
Favorite software and customizations
Website

Hardware

My work machine is a Macbook Air. I use a single 24" screen at home. My work is a mix of development and operations, so most of my time is spent within a code editor, a terminal and a browser.

Operating System

I started with Ubuntu (who didn’t?) and later switched to Arch Linux for my personal laptop. Arch has a command line installer and a steep learning curve, but I chose it to learn the internals of Linux. User-friendly distros like Ubuntu hide almost everything behind a GUI, and you don’t get to understand or configure anything, really.

I have since moved onto using macOS, but the servers at work run Linux, so having my Linux background helped.

Favorite software and customizations

I have the usual gamut of development tools like git, python, ruby, Postgres, MySQL etc.

For coding, I use a mix of PyCharm for Python and VS Code for everything else. VS Code works great for working on my development VM at work too.

I use zsh instead of the omnipresent bash, mainly for its superior auto-completion feature. I pimp it with oh-my-zsh with a few plugins (git, colored man, tmux etc).

At work, I use the second screen with an iTerm2 window for long running terminal sessions, many of which typically involve tailing logs or editing files while referring to docs on the primary screen. For pause-resume on servers, I use tmux or screen (depending on its availability on the servers).

For switching between directories quickly on the terminal, I use Z.

All my dot files actually reside on the Dropbox directory, with a symlink to the home directory, so that they’re always backed up. If I lose my laptop, all I have to do is install Dropbox and do the symlinks again, and I will have all my dot files and even my zsh history back.

Here are my dotfiles on Github, in case you want to steal them :)

Website

This website is rendered using Hugo, a static site generator, and hosted on GitHub Pages.