What I Use In 2026

Hardware

Even though I have a Mac Studio M2 Ultra and a desktop PC with a 7900 XTX and 5900XT, I still use my MacBook Pro M4 Max the most, mostly for convenience. I mostly use my desktop for gaming, game development, and testing out my software, but otherwise don't really use it for anything else. For my Mac Studio and my work laptop (when docked) I use a Kinesis Advantage 2, which has been my favorite keyboard for quite some time now. For mice, my work laptop uses a Kensington Slimblade, while my Mac Studio has a Apple Magic Trackpad, and my gaming PC uses a Razer Basilisk 3 with an EVGA Z15 keyboard, which is not on sale anymore.

My work monitor is a Gigtabyte M32UP, which has seemingly been discontinued. One of the reasons I got it is due to its built-in KVM, which is nice for switching between work and home systems without an external KVM switch, and it saves me desk space. My gaming PC uses a Samsung G95C 32:9 ultra-wide monitor. For the price I think it's pretty good, and I'd recommend it if you get a good deal on sale. While I'm already used to ultra-wides for gaming, definitely research it before you buy one because the support is very hit or miss on native resolution support, so often you will have black bars or rely on mods/upscaling.

For headphones I typically use AirPods Max because they are pretty comfortable, have solid noise cancelling, and are easy to switch between systems. I wouldn't pay full price, and even then they are overpriced for what they are compared to offerings from Bose or Sony, but I find them to be comfortable and good at what they do. The other pair I use everywhere else are AirPods Pro 3. For PC gaming I have consistently used the HyperX CloudX or other variants as they typically go on sale and have 53mm drivers, detachable mic, and decent headphone cups that you can find cheap replacements for.

For gaming on the PC I use my OLED Steam Deck most of the time simply because I prefer handhelds when possible, but on my gaming PC I use a DualSense Edge as my main controller because I simply find the DualSense to be the most comfortable out right now, and I prefer having rear buttons when possible. I also have a Switch 2 for Nintendo exclusives.

Finally, I am using an iPhone 17 Pro as my phone, and still using my 12.9in iPad Pro 4th generation as my tablet; I plan to upgrade the latter maybe once the next generation is released, but it has been surprisingly reliable for how old it is, outside of poor battery. I've been trying to get back into drawing, and Pixquare is a really awesome pixel art editor that works across all Apple platforms, especially the iPad with an Apple Pencil.

Coding Environment

I've been a diehard JetBrains users for over a decade at this point, and the All Products Pack is what I use because it covers both of my personal and professional needs, including .NET, JavaScript/TypeScript, Python, and Go. In addition, since I tend to use the Godot game engine for game development, Rider is my go-to IDE for game development. Paying for an IDE in the age of LLMs is not going to make sense for a lot of developers, but I still enjoy the featureset and user experience and will likely continue to use them for the foreseeable future.

Still, I also use both Zed and VS Code for my day-to-day coding needs, depending on the project and my preference due to their extensive plugin ecosystem and customizability. I typically use NeoVim for my text editor of choice in the terminal, but for a visual scratchpad or text buffer I also like to use TextMate.

Right now at home for AI coding assistance I tend to use Codex and OpenCode Go as my fallback. At work I use Codex and Claude. Lately I've been trying to experiment more with local models as they seemed to have gotten signfificantly better since the last time I tried them last year, so with LM Studio and OpenCode CLI I've been experimenting a bit with different models.

Programming Languages

For a while now I've mostly been using Rust, C++, C#, and Swift in my personal projects, both public and private, while at work I typically work with a mix of languages due to being a consultant, including Python, TypeScript, Ruby, C#, Objective-C, and Kotlin.

Lately, I've been experimenting with getting back into using various Lisps for both general-purpose programming as well as things like using them for game development. Seeing all of the cool stuff Shirakumo has accomplished using Common Lisp has made me want to see if I can make it work for my purposes, as Common Lisp was one of the languages I enjoyed using when I was first learning to program.

Also, since the advent of ClojureDart and Clojure on GraalVM I have been taking a look at using Clojure as well, but more for tooling and other alternative use cases outside of the standard web application development space. I've found ClojureDart is pretty capable of creating pretty small and fast standalone binaries that are competitive with even languages like Go, and Graal is even faster. I'm also a big fan of Babashka, which let's you use Clojure as a scripting language for automating tasks and running scripts.

Developer Tooling

My go-to for pretty much any project is to use mise, which is a cross-platform tool for managing multiple language runtimes and tools. mise combines dependency and toolchain management with a nice task runner interface that makes it easy to scaffold projects without needing things like Makefiles or a ton of bespoke shell scripts. It also has a lot of customization and emerging features like OCI support, and I highly recommend it for any project.

Currently I host my projects on GitHub, like most people, but I am looking into switching to Codeberg in the future, or possibly self-hosting my own. While I think GitHub was historically a great platform and gives you a lot of nice features for free out of the box, it is simply not reliable anymore and GitHub Actions seem to be a security nightmare as of late.