My Tools of Trade 2025 Edition

2025 is a year of engineering and operational excellence within the Value Added Services division, where I am an engineering manager. The aim of the year is to build a foundation for 10x scaling of services, while maintaining a secure, stable platform without interruption to our services. This year I will be working with architecture, tackling technical debt, adding new features, building tools to support operations teams (tech support, finance, reconciliation, business development and customer account management) with a set of systems running Angular front-end, with backend APIs in ExpressJS, NestJS, Go, Java and probably Laravel. There will be some data extraction, reporting, ETL and visualizations baked in to round out the experience

I will probably not have time for side projects, but the day-to-day operations are plenty to keep me on my toes, learning, and adapting to supporting operations at scale of a 24×7 business

Note – This was inspired by Wes Bos, who I am huge fan of! This list will be a living document that I will update whenever anything changes!

The previous editions are:

2025 Workspace Setup

My current hardware is focused on improving my productivity and working in a more healthy manner. I have also graduated into my new home office which I am looking to pimp up and make the cockpit of my USS-Kabanda (named after the US warships)

Standing desk - sitting mode
Standing desk - standing mode

Hardware

My primary machine is a 16″ 2023 M2 based Macbook Pro with 16GB RAM and 1TB HDD covered with a brown colored case for scratch protection, the M2 performance is out of this world, and when you add all day battery when needed

I work off a Dripex standing desk, which offers memory presets for sitting and standing positions. My default screen is a Lenovo G34w-10 34-Inch WQHD Curved Gaming Monitor an ultra-wide which is now my primary monitor, gives me the equivalent of 2 full 17″ screens side-by-side which is great for web development.

I maintain my laptop in clam-shell use using JARLINK Vertical Laptop Stand to help save space on my desk.

I use a Caldigit TS4 hub which provides a single thunderbolt cable into my laptop to sweet collection of 18 ports for all my needs. I found that adding charging to the hub was causing excessive heating and poor performance so I added an Anker 4 port fast charge adapter which has 2 USB-C cables, 1 micro-USB cable and 1 Apple lightening cable.

Almost full hub cables for all the home office

I switched to a Logitech MX Ergo mouse as my primary driver on the home office setup, for improving my erogonomics, and I totally love it leaving my MX Vertical as the mouse that I have on-the-go always in my laptop bag when I need to leave the home office. I have kept the Gimars Large Smooth Superfine Fibre Memory Foam Ergonomic Mouse Pad Wrist Rest Support . I am using RGB backlit Keychron K3 with Gaeton brown switches (which are very quiet)

Logitech MX Vertical and MX Ergo mice

My day-to-day audio and video accessories are a varied mix:

  1. Jabra Speak 510 UC Wireless Bluetooth Portable Conference Speaker
  2. Sony WH-1000XM5 The Best Wireless Noise Canceling Headphones for calls where I need to move around that sits on a Lamicall Headphone Stand, Desktop Headset Holder when not in use
  3. Phone calls and podcasts are powered by Soundcore P40i ear-buds providing dual connection to both my phone and laptop
  4. Video is powered by Logitech Brio 301 Full HD Webcam with Privacy Shutter which means I never need to remove my laptop from a clam shell plus I only open the shutter when I need to be seen on video, nothing like those random videos during lockdown
Soundcore by Anker Life P3 Noise Cancelling Earbuds

One of the most important tools anyone who sits for long is the chair they use, as they spend majority of their time in it. I cannot find the make and model of the one that I use photos below, however pairing with Lifelong Wheels was the best decision I ever made

Power supply is erratic and is disruptive, my current hack is to use an inverter and a 200mAH dry powder battery which can support my Internet router, TV for about 8 hours of use, as well as about 5 charges from from 10% to full for my laptop which is about 3-4 days of working. The long term plan is to have a copy of this backup for my workstation

Software

  1. As a software developer my primary tool is an IDE, the Jetbrains suite of IDEs – I purchased the Toolbox subscription which is the best value
    • Webstorm, PHPStorm, IntelliJIDEA and Webstorm are my primary IDEs
    • Data Grip for database management (MySQL and PostgreSQL)
    • Fleet for lightweight editing
    • Looking to Aqua for QA related tasks
  2. iTerm2 as my Terminal despite MacOS default shell changes, I have maintained bash as my default shell
  3. HomeBrew for package management, my primary installtion tool for both command line and gui tools
  4. Firefox for all browsing needs and Firefox Developer Edition for web development – I dumped Google Chrome, only use it when I meet a service that does not work on Firefox
  5. Cloud storage – OneDrive for office work, Dropbox for personal use with Google Drive for backup (currently subscribing for 200GB plan)
  6. Communication and collaboration tools are Office 365, Microsoft Teams and Slack – its amazing the simplicity of fewer tools

Utilities

I have added this section for the tools that simplify a lot of my day-to-day activities, they are tiny tools in the Unix style with a big impact so I figured I should highlight them separately

  1. Alfred for opening apps (not yet grown to the workflow stage) so using the free version
  2. Caffeine for keeping the laptop awake when I need to especially during long processes
  3. Magnet (paid) for sizing different screens when in use
  4. RDM for changing resolutions as I take screenshots for documentation
  5. Typora (paid) for Markdown editing
  6. Clippy (paid) for managing my clipboard
  7. Texty (paid) for reading the SMS messages on my phone on my laptop

Do let me know if you found this useful and please share how you are setup

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