My development setup in 2026: editor, terminal, and flow
A development environment that has grown simpler over the years — which tools I've kept and why I let most new ones pass me by.
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Tools & Technologies
Developer tools: Git, Composer, npm, build tools, Docker, databases, messaging, search, CI/CD and debugging.
This category has 26 posts.
The third MCP server was reasonable. The rest were not
MCP was the right answer for giving an agent a project's documentation. As the count grew, the servers themselves became the thing needing maintenance.
You chose RAG. The real work starts now
RAG or fine-tuning gets answered everywhere. The three questions left after it — the key, the model choice, the budget — get answered nowhere.
18,750 req/s: precise, repeated, and three times wrong
Two phases of the same run measured the same service three times apart. What caught the wrong one was not a better statistic but a second method.
Production access sat with one person, and that person took a holiday
The only person with production database access went on holiday and diagnosis stopped. The need came down to four sentences; each became a design decision.
Don't pick a partial index for speed
Four index strategies on a 10M-row Postgres queue table: the winner didn't win for the reason I gave, and one setting turned it into a 1,635x loss.