Things I use

🖥️ OS

• Arch Linux
  • Great OS, I prefer the rolling-release model and with the new archinstall script it’s as easy to install as Ubuntu.
• KDE Plasma
  • Runs well on my hardware, looks good, and has great theming options, this + Arch is the easiest and most customizable way for me to get up and running.
• Konsole
  • Comes with KDE Plasma, I don’t bother changing it since it works well and has good quality-of-life features like multiple tabs.
• Brave Browser
  • I use this as my main browser, it’s fast and has a good adblocker built in. I tend to not overthink what browser I use as long as it isn’t Chrome or Edge.

📨 Email Stuff

• emailwiz
  • This script is great for setting up a mail server, you can turn any VPS into an email server, highly recommend doing this instead of using Gmail, especially if you already have a website.
• Thunderbird
  • Similar to my browser choice I don’t overthink this. It’s a foss email client and I don’t need to bother hosting a front-end for my email server.

⌨️ IDEs and Editors

• Jetbrains IDEs
  • Not foss, but has a lot of helpful tools. Free if you have a university email which is fantastic.
• VSCodium
  • A little more lightweight than Jetbrains. Not my favorite option, but I have started to enjoy using it more recently.
• Vim
  • I use plain Vim when I’m on a remote server. Otherwise, I use Vim keybindings in VSCodium or Jetbrains products.

🧑🏻‍💻 Preferred Languages and Frameworks

• Go
  • I really enjoy using Go. It’s a recent addition to my skill set. I’ve gotten some practice writing small scripts like GoPass which is just a simple password generator I use often. I’m currently working on a sizeable web project with Go that I wrote about here. The idea that you can write a website, compile it into a single binary, has a built-in HTTP server, and is extremely performant is very appealing to me. The language and standard library are very well-designed, and the community is great. I’m very excited to see where it goes in the future.
• PHP/Laravel
  • Laravel is fantastic for writing web applications. Currently, my job is working on a sizeable business platform, and it’s very nice for writing features fast. The design philosophy for the framework makes developing fun. The biggest downside is that it’s not as performant as Go, and you’re stuck writing in PHP. I like the project structure and ease of use so much though, that my previously mentioned Go web project is structured similarly to Laravel.
• Hugo
  • This website is generated with Hugo! I would advise using Hugo for any website that’s more than a couple of pages, and doesn’t need any sort of back-end logic. Everyone’s blog, documentation, and purely informational websites should be generated with Hugo.

🖧 Self-hosted

• Gitea
  • Great alternative to GitHub, written in Go. I’d recommend any developer to give it a shot and move away from paid proprietary services. Alternatively, there is a large public instance called Codeberg that you can use.
• Navidrome
  • Recently I have started using Navidrome. I was sick of fixing Koel every time it broke and dealing with file permission errors because of PHP. Navidrome is written in Go so setup is much easier, it runs faster, and I don’t get weird errors anymore. Its web interface is very good, mobile not so much. Luckily it is subsonic compatible and there are plenty of good compatible mobile clients. This really does fit the role of a “self-hosted spotify” better than anything else I have tried.
• Koel
  • A beautiful and intuitive front-end for a music server, written in Laravel and Vue. Think of it like a self-hosted Spotify. With recent updates, the mobile version of the site runs flawlessly. I wrote a whole article on how to install Koel on your own server here: Koel Install Guide
• Caddy
  • A web server written in Go. It has incredible performance, memory safety, no dependency on libc, automatic SSL (no more certbot and cron jobs to renew!), and the config files are stupidly simple. This blog’s config in Caddy is two or three lines. The migration for this site from Nginx to Caddy probably took me ~10min. I plan on writing a migration guide soon.

Links to other helpful websites

📺 Videos

• Luke Smith
  • Just a great guy with good technology advice. I’ve learned a lot from his videos.

🌐 Websites

• Heaven Tree
  • A nice Christian web ring where members post well written and insightful content.
• Luke Smith
  • Luke’s website, has a lot of interesting blog posts and links to his other projects.
• LandChad
  • Another Luke Smith project. Great for finding self-hosted software and learning how to easily deploy it.
• Based Cooking
  • Just a cooking website generated with Hugo, not bloated with ads or tracking. I use it often.