Uses

What I use

The hardware, software, configuration and self-hosted tools that make up my daily workflow as a developer and system administrator.
This page is inspired by the Uses page.

Kayleigh Pilgrim's home office

Hardware

My hardware setup is built around a powerful laptop, a large external display and comfortable peripherals that make long development and system administration sessions easier. I prefer gear that feels responsive, reliable and flexible enough for coding, writing, debugging, monitoring and remote server work.

Laptop: MSI Vector GP68HX 13VH, i9-13950HX, 64GB RAM, RTX 4080

Monitor: Samsung Odyssey G55T

Keyboard: Razer BlackWidow V4 Pro

Mouse: Razer DeathAdder V3 Pro

Headphones: Bose QuietComfort Ultra

Screenbar light: BenQ Halo

Tablet: iPad Air 13" with Magic Keyboard and Pencil Pro

Software

My software setup is built around a Linux-first workflow, fast development tools and a configuration I can easily reproduce across machines. I prefer tools that are reliable, keyboard-friendly and flexible enough for both web development and system administration work.

Configuration: View my dotfiles on GitHub

OS: CachyOS on desktop, Debian on servers

IDE: PhpStorm for PHP/JavaScript, NeoVim for everything else

Terminal: Kitty with Oh My Zsh & Powerlevel10k

Tools: Tmux, Git, DBeaver, Postman, Thunderbird, Bitwarden

Email & Productivity: Google Workspace

Notes: Notion (planning to self-host soon)

Font: JetBrainsMono Nerd Font with ligatures

AI: A mix of Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Junie

Homelab & self-hosted tools

My homelab gives me a place to run the services I use every day, experiment with infrastructure, automate my home and keep improving my Linux, networking and server management setup. It is both a practical toolkit and a small learning environment where I can test ideas before using them on production servers.

Home Assistant: Smart home automation

Vikunja: Task management app that works best for me

n8n: Automation workflows

Immich: Self-hosted photo management

Jellyfin: Self-hosted Netflix-like app

Wakapi: Like a fitbit for code, tracks my coding statistics in all IDE's I use

FreshRSS: Keeps track of articles from RSS feeds I like to read

Linkding: Management of all my bookmarks and reading lists

Glance: Dashboard + start page for browser

Bytestash: Management of code snippets

Tailscale: Mesh VPN that securely connects all my devices, apps and servers

Monitoring: Icinga2 + Prometheus + Grafana

Automation: Puppet + Foreman

Webservers: Nginx + PHP-fpm + MariaDB + Redis + Supervisor (all heavily tuned, planning to test FrankenPHP soon)

Last updated: