My Current Dev Setup

OS preference

I grew up loving windows, because I used to play a ton of video games. I learned how to code on a windows machine, and it didn't take long for me to find myself using VSCode. I began my career in January 2023, where we were issued MacBooks. I strongly disliked MacOS for a long time, it just felt wrong. However, I was using VSCode and about a year ago (2025) I started to use NeoVim and I spent a lot more time in my terminal. This is when I started to become more familiar with terminal emulators, shells, and coding in those environments. This ultimately made it frustrating to program on windows, so I decided to nuke my OS on my home rig and install Linux Mint Cinnamon. After some time on Mint Cinnamon, I decided to dual boot CachyOS using the Niri window manager.

Terminal

On my Mint Cinnamon OS I use Kitty with the fish shell, and on CachyOS I use Alacritty with fish shell. I really don't have a preference over which terminal emulator I use, but I found fish shell to come prepackaged with all the shell config that I like. I honestly couldn't even tell you the difference between the two terminals because I just haven't felt the need or had the interest to compare them. They both accomplish what I want.

Editor/IDE

I am an NVIM user. I'm not great at setting up an environment from scratch, I don't often check for new plugins, and the reason for my swap was actually pretty simple. I switched from VSCode to NVIM because I was annoyed with my VSCode terminal and 'environment' having different settings. I would select which python interpreter I wanted and it wouldn't reflect in the terminal. My friend told me to just switch to NVIM so I didn't have to bother with the VSCodeisms anymore, so I did. Now every issue feels more like a skill issue with the tool I am building with, and not with the tool that I'm using to build. I don't want to learn VSCode, I want to learn how to engineer software correctly.

Languages

I spent most of my time at my previous company Whisker writing in Python and TypeScript React. Usually it was Python for our backend systems in the cloud, and TS + React for our frontends. I want to learn Go because I think the concept of Goroutines is interesting, and I'm also interested in Rust because I've seen the speed of tools written in Rust (shoutout to uv). I should probably get more comfortable with SQL in general, but I would rather spend my time understanding the pros and cons of different DBs in general rather than, lets be honest, learning a lang that is probably going to get swallowed by AI in the next few years. Learning about SQL vs. NoSQL, relational vs non-relational, document stores, etc. is more interesting to me.