People ask how I build the things on this site, and honestly the answer is 90% boring. The interesting part isn't the gear — it's that I stopped switching tools and started tuning the ones I kept. Here's everything, in the order I touch it during a workday.

Hardware

MacBook Pro (M3 Pro, 14") — 18 GB, 1 TB. This is the whole desk. I've used Intel machines for years and the M series is the first laptop where I never think about the fans or the build process again.

• External: a cheap 27" 4K panel when I'm at the desk (color-accurate-ish, doesn't need to be anything fancier).
• Keyboard: the built-in Magic Keyboard. I know, boring. I tried mechanical for two weeks; the key travel turned out to be the thing I didn't want.
• Mouse/trackpad: Logitech MX Master 3S for long sessions, the trackpad for the laptop bag. The MX's scroll wheel is worth the money alone.

Editor

I live in Visual Studio Code. That's it — no Neovim cult re-entry. What matters is that it's configured to feel fast:

• Theme: a hand-rolled dark theme. RGB off except a single coral accent I use for errors so they physically pop.
• Font: JetBrains Mono, 13px, ligatures on. I have zero aesthetic interest in fonts beyond "can I tell 0 from O at a glance" — JetBrains wins that.
• Extensions the build breaks without: exactly three. Prettier, ESLint, Tailwind CSS IntelliSense. Everything else is garnish.
• The rule I actually follow: if I reach for a feature twice, I bind it to a shortcut. Command+Shift+P is for the rare thing, the rest is muscle memory.

{
  "editor.fontFamily": "JetBrains Mono",
  "editor.fontSize": 13,
  "editor.minimap.enabled": false,
  "files.autoSave": "afterDelay"
}

Terminal

The default macOS Terminal, zsh, and Oh My Zsh — but trimmed to almost nothing. No heavy prompt theme, no plugin wall. My whole dotfiles philosophy is: the shell is a calculator with a history, not a dashboard.

The two things I can't code without:

1. zsh-autosuggestions — the grayed-out ghost text that completes my history as I type. Once you have it, plain terminals feel broken.
2. zoxide — z ~pe/meroUI in three keystrokes instead of spelunking cd chains.

Aliases I actually use daily:

alias gs='git status'
alias ga='git add -A'
alias gc='git commit -m'
alias gl='git log --oneline -10'
alias bp='pnpm build'
alias d='npm run dev'

Browsers

Chrome for building, all day. The DevTools in the latest versions are good enough now that I don't keep a second browser around or reach for a --disable flag the way I used to.

Two tabs I keep pinned on every project:

• http://localhost:3000 — the site, constantly.
• The PR list for whatever I'm working on, GitHub PRs sorted by "needs review".

I ship with three browser profiles — work, personal, and a clean "test" profile with zero extensions — because half of all CSS bugs turn out to be a stale extension.

Terminal bell: the missing layer

Everything above is replaceable. The one thing I refuse to drop is the sound layer — and yes, that's a theme on this site too.

My shell beeps on long build finishes and my editor has a soft click. When npm run build finishes with an error you hear it fail, so I can leave the terminal and come back when it's done. It sounds like a gimmick but it saves me ten minutes a day of staring at logs.

The actual stack

The boring, reliable core that stays consistent across projects:

| Layer | Choice | Why it stays | | ----- | ------ | ------------ | | Framework | Next.js + TypeScript | SSG by default, easy static exports | | Styling | Tailwind CSS | I stopped writing CSS-class names years ago | | Animation | GSAP + Framer Motion | GSAP for scroll/scrolltrigger, Motion for UI | | 3D | Three.js + react-three-fiber | when a page needs texture, not gimmick | | Deploy | Cloudflare | static-first, cheap, global | | AI side | LangGraph + FastAPI | for the RAG/research experiments |

I don't chase new tools weekly. I chase reliability — and these all have a decade of docs, a huge community, and a version history that doesn't break me every six months.

What I'd change

Honestly: nothing drastic. I'd probably move to a 16" if I sat at a desk all day, and I keep flirting with bun as a full-time package manager instead of npm. But every "switch" I've tried this year has come back with the same lesson — the tool you already know, tuned aggressively, beats the shiny one you have to re-learn. That's the whole setup.