💻 What Tech I Use

October 27, 2020

The following is my current web development setup and things that I use in my day to day life. It is inspired from Wes Bos's Uses.Tech page. Hopefully there's a few interesting things in there for anyone checking out the list.

Design and Development

• Visual Studio Code has been my go to editor for years now. These are the main extensions/theme I use:
  • Solarized Dark
  • CFML
  • GitLens
  • Git History
• Windows 10
• Commandbox runs my local Coldfusion development environment. It's a must have for any Coldfusion developer.
• Windows Terminal is great at managing multiple shells and letting me color code my backgrounds depending on what environment I'm in.
• Figma is a lot of fun to use as a non-designer. Much more intuitive than something like Illustrator in my mind.
• Adobe Creative Suite I use mostly for Photoshop and Lightroom.
• Insomnia Core is helpful for managing and testing REST web services.
• Toad for Oracle is the best tool I've found for working with Oracle databases.
• Google Cloud free tier is what I used to setup this site running on Ubuntu. It doesn't have a monthly cost associated with it, which is great for a small site like this. I just have to maintain the domain.

Desktop Apps, Plugins, Tools

• Powertoys I use mostly for the FanyZones feature.
• Vivaldi is built on Chromium, but goes the extra mile with lots of great extra features. Helps me de-google a little bit as well.
• KeepassXC My choice for a personal password manager.
• TeraCopy Provides a little more control when copying files.
• Chocolatey I use to manage my installed software and keep everything up to date.

Camera Gear

• Canon 6d is definitely little outdated now. As a side hustle I shot a few weddings with it and thought it performed well. It's decent for photos, but wouldn't recommend it for video.
• Sigma 70-200mm F2.8 DG OS HSM has been a great portrait lens for me, and is considerably cheaper than the Canon equivalent.

Home Network

• Raspberry Pi running PiHole to block ads. Have to make use of the Pi somehow!
• MikroTik hAP ac2 router gave me the best bang for my buck when searching for a new router. It has the powerful RouterOS running on it that let me do things like setting up a VPN, creating multiple subnets, or automating backups.
• Ran Cat 6 throughout my house to get the best possible connection.