My Developer Toolkit in 2026

Editor & Terminal

I spend most of my day in Neovim with a minimal config — LSP, Treesitter, and Telescope for fuzzy finding. For larger refactors or when I need a visual debugger, I reach for VS Code with the Vim extension. The terminal is Ghostty with a custom theme that matches my site’s dark palette.

For shell, I use Zsh with a handful of aliases and no framework. Starship prompt gives me git status and runtime versions at a glance without the overhead of Oh My Zsh.

Infrastructure & DevOps

Terraform handles all infrastructure. I’ve tried Pulumi and CDK — they’re fine, but HCL’s declarative model maps better to how I think about cloud resources. For container orchestration, it’s Kubernetes on EKS for production workloads and Docker Compose for local development.

CI/CD runs on GitHub Actions. I’ve built reusable workflows that handle linting, testing, building, and deploying across all my projects. ArgoCD handles the GitOps side — every merge to main triggers a rolling deployment.

Monitoring & Observability

Grafana + Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, and Tempo for distributed tracing. The full Grafana stack gives me a single pane of glass without vendor lock-in. For alerting, PagerDuty routes critical issues to my phone, while Slack handles the rest.

I built CostSentry to monitor AWS spend — it’s saved me from several surprise invoices already. Combined with CloudWatch anomaly detection, I have a solid baseline for cost and performance monitoring.