What I Use

The tools, software, and hardware I use in my work and daily life. This page was inspired by Wes Bos on his site. The right tools make your work experience better, and you're worth it.

Hardware

MacBook Pro

My daily driver. The M-series chips are incredible for development work. I'm currently using the M3 Pro version

What you spend HOURS sitting on every day needs to be right for your body. When we had an in-person office, we had Aeron chairs and I never could get comfortable in anything else. This chair is VERY close to that one. I picked it up used from https://www.envirotechoffice.com/.

LG Ultrafine 27UK850-W

Once you go to a 4K monitor, you can't go back. I pair this with my Macbook's screen as a second monitor and it works amazing.

Sony a6700

This is not as much a "work" thing, since I use it for personal use, but it's a damn fine camera. Coming from a Canon Rebel SLR, this thing is amazing at capturing video and stills. I used it this football season to film my son's college football games, and I also use it for in-home studio stuff for when I record videos for work. Currently using the stock 18-135 lens for pretty much everything. Highly recommend.

Peak Design Messenger Bag

This bag is my sidekick everywhere I go. It can easily hold my camera, laptop, spare clothes, other tech gear, and even a tripod can be attached. Highly recommend MANY of the Peak Design products (I also use their camera clips and straps, among other things).

BenQ ScreenBar Halo 2

This little light hangs over your monitor and does a magic light trick where where your eyes don't get tired when working too much. It also has a cool little wheel switch that you use to control it, but you never use that since it turns on and off automatically when you approach.

Software

Agility CMS

Headless CMS that powers this site. Great developer experience and content editor tools. I also work here (I'm the CTO :).

VS Code

My primary code editor. Love the extensions and the integrated terminal - I use the Claude Code extension in here. I've toyed with the Insiders edition, too. Usually pretty stable. Not to be confused with the old-school Visual Studio, which I run inside Parallels on my Macbook only when I'm doing stuff in old .Net projects.

Next.js

The React framework I use for most of my web projects (including this site!). Great developer experience and performance. I've been using Next since v10 and I think, while it has it's issues, and some growing pains, overall it's the best framework out there. I really like Astro as well, and I think there's hope for true competition. Once Next has legit hosting adapters, life will get WAY better for actually deploying Next on environments other than Netlify and Vercel.

TypeScript

Type-safe JavaScript. Essential for building maintainable applications. How did we every survive writing plain old Javascript? I actually started my career writing C++ and Java, and I also thought JavaScript was supposed to be a variant of Java (it's not). I've also coded a TON in C#, which is the defacto language for .Net apps, but I prefer TypeScript now.

Tailwind CSS

Utility-first CSS framework. Makes styling fast and consistent. I also purchased a paid license to their Tailwind Plus (see link) which I think is GREAT value for folks learning how to use it.

Cursor, Claude Code, Github Copilot

AI-powered code editing tools. Cursor is great because it's so integrated as a fully-featured IDE. Copilot, too, but Claude Code is BY FAR the best implementation of AI code editing and creation. Game changer for productivity.

Tools

GitHub

Version control and collaboration. Essential for all my projects, both personal and work related, although we use Azure DevOps for anything we deploy to Azure at work.

Vercel & Netlify

Deployment platforms for Next.js (and other frameworks). Seamless integration and great performance. I put these pretty much at an equal in terms of hosting perf and cost, however, the Agility CMS integration in Vercel makes it SUPER easy to setup and deploy on Vercel, so I end up using it more.