Without a single doubt, this site is heavily inspired by the sites of Lee Rob, Kent C. Dodds & Paul Stamatiou and nowhere close to the awesome sites all three have built for themselves. And one thing that I especially loved about Paul’s site was the section of gear he uses. So, here’s my rendition of the uses page where I share the tech products that I recommend, or I use in my day-to-day life.
Software that I use every day at home & work
- Email – Gmail & Google Workspaces are my favorite email solutions and I doubt anything will change that any time soon. At one point, I thought of using Cloudflare’s email routing and saving a bunch of money by getting rid of Google Workspaces and I might explore the idea in future – but not for now.
- Operating System – Windows 11, Ubuntu (WSL2), & Mac OS X
- Browser – Microsoft Edge & Google Chrome
- Password Managers – KeePass & KeePassXC, Google Passwords, LastPass, & Microsoft Authenticator
- Authenticator – Microsoft Authenticator
- Chat – Slack, Discord, Skype, WhatsApp, and sometimes MS Teams
- SFTP/FTP Client or Cloud Storage browser – Cyberduck
- IDE – VS Code
- Notes/Journal – Obsidian
- Terminal – iTerm2 & Windows Terminal (Defaults to Ubuntu) with Zsh as the preference for shell. I prefer to use Oh-my-zsh as well.
- Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) – Jira
- Git – GitHub & Bitbucket
- Files – Google Drive, Backblaze
- Photos – Google Photos and the native photo software that comes with the OS. Earlier I used to be a fan of IrfanView, but now the native apps are good enough for basic usage.
- Music – YouTube Music
- Office Applications – Google Workspaces
- Screen capturing – Shottr, Kap, ShareX & Lightshot.
- Local Development Environment – DDEV, OrbStack.
Technologies that power this site
Even though I’ve explored to use AstroJS for this website and did it for a while, I gave in to what I think has become my instinct and that is WordPress (Can’t help it, old habits seldom die).
I guess the ease of building a powerful site and ability to publish from anywhere was more important to me than drooling over the newer technology solutions, which would take countless hours to bring it to the level where I will feel comfortable, and it didn’t make any sense to use a headless solution either if I had to host WordPress in the backend anyway. So, without further ado – here are some of the technologies that power this site –
- Server’s Operating System – Ubuntu
- Web server – Apache + Nginx + PHP-FPM
- CDN + WAF – CloudFlare
- CMS – WordPress
- Analytics –
Self hosted Plausible on forever free Oracle Cloud. Cloudflare Web Analytics. - Domain registrar – Cloudflare
- Webserver Management – HestiaCP
- Backups – Backblaze B2
- Media Offloading – Backblaze B2