I’ve been refining my development stack over the past year, gravitating toward tools that are open source, composable, and respect my workflow rather than dictating it. Here’s what I’m running.
The brain: Obsidian
Everything starts in Obsidian. It’s my second brain — ideas, project notes, research, daily journals. The vault syncs everywhere, and because it’s just Markdown files on disk, I own my data completely.
I use it as the central hub for project planning. Ideas start as notes, grow into designs, and eventually become code in ~/Projects/.
The builder: Claude Code
Claude Code is my daily driver for development. It reads my vault, understands my project context, and helps me ship faster. I’ve built a set of custom skills on top of it — structured workflows for planning, reviewing, QA, and deployment.
The key insight: AI tools work best when they have context. By keeping everything in my vault and giving Claude Code access to it, every conversation starts with full project awareness.
The site: Astro
This blog runs on Astro — a static site generator that ships zero JavaScript by default. For content sites, it’s the best tool I’ve found. Write Markdown, get fast pages. The component model (.astro files) is clean and intuitive.
The host: Cloudflare Pages
Free, fast, and my domain was already on Cloudflare. Git-push deploys, preview URLs for branches, and zero configuration for DNS/SSL.
The philosophy
Every tool in my stack is either open source or has a clear data export path. I don’t want to be locked into any platform. If a tool disappears tomorrow, my work — my notes, my code, my writing — all lives in plain files on my machine.
That’s not paranoia. That’s just good engineering.