Uses

A list of the tools, apps, and hardware I use day to day to build and ship things. And yeah, that is a Johnny Mnemonic GIF in the background.

Development

PhpStorm is my primary IDE. For Laravel work the static analysis, refactoring tools, and database integration are worth the licence on their own.
Laragon runs my local environment on Windows. Spinning up a new PHP version, database, or virtual host takes seconds, with none of the ceremony of a container setup.
Laravel is where most of my work happens. It gets out of the way on the boring parts — queues, auth, migrations — and leaves room to think about the actual problem.
For interactive interfaces I lean on the TALL stack: Tailwind, Alpine, Laravel, and Livewire. It covers most of what people reach for a SPA to do, with a fraction of the moving parts.
When a front end genuinely needs to be its own application I use React and Next.js. This site is built with them.
For CSS I use vanilla CSS with PostCSS, which gets you upcoming CSS features without committing to a pre-processor or a css-in-js runtime.

Production runs on Ubuntu behind Nginx. I handle the server configuration myself rather than treating it as someone else’s problem — it is usually where the performance work actually pays off.
MySQL is my default database, with schema and index design done deliberately up front instead of patched in once things get slow.
Redis handles queues, caching, and sessions. Moving anything slow into a queued job is the cheapest performance win available in most Laravel apps.
GitHub Actions runs my CI/CD — tests and static analysis on every push, and deployment from the main branch.
Next.js front ends like this one deploy to Vercel, which removes an entire category of build and hosting work I would otherwise be maintaining by hand.