Tools

What I use

The hardware, software, and services I rely on to do the work I do. Updated as things change.

Last updated: May 2026. In the /uses/ tradition of personal-site references for the tools people actually rely on.

Hardware

Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch (M-series) as the main work machine. Day to day this is where the writing, the architecture work, the development on Meridian and Springboard, and the everyday browser work all happen.
External 27-inch display for the second monitor at home.
Logitech MX Master mouse, MX Mechanical keyboard.
iPhone for the obvious things, and as the secondary device for testing mobile layouts of the various sites.

Cursor as the primary editor. Set up against an internal LLM endpoint for the regulated work; default Claude / GPT for the personal work.
Claude Code in the terminal for substantial refactoring or cross-file work. The two tools complement each other; Cursor for the inline assist, Claude Code for the multi-step changes.
zsh with Oh My Zsh for the shell. Nothing exotic.
iTerm2 for the terminal.

The stacks I actually use day to day vary by project. The current mix:

TypeScript and Next.js — Meridian, Springboard, the personal site.
Python (FastAPI, Flask, SQLAlchemy, Pydantic) — Meridian's integration layer, CANVAS, anything that touches the heavier server-side processing.
Vue 3 (Nuxt 3) — CANVAS's frontend.
PostgreSQL as the default relational database for everything serious. SQLite for prototypes and tiny tools.
Markdown + git for almost all writing.

Azure for the regulated work. Specifically App Service, PostgreSQL Flexible Server, Blob Storage, Entra ID for SSO, Key Vault for secrets, Application Insights for telemetry. Azure OpenAI for any AI workloads that need EEA residency.
Cloudflare for the personal sites (Workers with assets, Pages Functions where useful, R2 occasionally, Web Analytics for visit tracking).
GitHub for source control on everything personal and organisation-controlled.
GitHub Actions for the personal-site CI/CD and for the cron workers on Springboard.

Anthropic Claude as the daily-driver LLM. Both directly via claude.ai and through Claude Code.
OpenAI for occasional comparison and for the production AI workloads on Azure OpenAI.
Google Gemini specifically for the Meridian conversational assistant — the long-context window and the EEA region availability through Vertex AI both made it the right choice for that specific use case.
Mistral keeping on the radar for regulated workloads.

These come up enough to be worth listing.

Excalidraw for whiteboard-style architecture diagrams. The hand-drawn aesthetic survives screenshots much better than the cleaner vector tools.
Mermaid for diagrams that need to live in source control alongside ADRs and documentation.
dbdiagram.io for ERD work.
C4 model at the conceptual level — Container and Component diagrams when they help, skipped when they don't.

11ty (Eleventy) as the static site generator. Markdown source, Nunjucks templates.
Cloudflare Workers with static assets for hosting. Pages Functions pattern for the OAuth flow that secures the Decap CMS editor at /studio/.
Decap CMS for the in-browser editor, with a separate GitHub account (tarun-blog-bot) holding the OAuth identity for the CMS.

Field Notes notebooks for the genuinely paper-bound thinking.
Obsidian when I want a graph view over my notes; the markdown files live in iCloud.

No social-media management tools. The accounts are deliberately minimal.
No project management software beyond Linear for the work that needs it. Most of the architecture work lives in markdown and diagrams.
No paid writing tools. The blog flow is markdown → 11ty → git push.