Tools

What I work with. No recommendations, only what actually runs here, and where it is worth it, why.

What drives the applications

Laravel for everything. Not because it is the best, but because I want to be good at one thing rather than half-good at three. Blade instead of an interface in the browser: what the server hands over already finished cannot break in the browser.

MySQL in the applications. This site has no database at all. The notes are files, and that is enough for a few texts a year.

Tailwind in the applications, hand-written CSS here. For a site with six sections a framework is more ballast than help.

Where it runs

Dokploy on a Linux server, with Docker and Traefik as a reverse proxy behind it. The machine sits at a friend’s place and is rented from STRATO.

FrankenPHP instead of nginx and php-fpm: one process instead of three, no supervisor, one fewer Dockerfile to explain.

Cloudflare for DNS. For some of the applications as a proxy in front as well. That is a decision with consequences, see the privacy policy.

What watches me build

GlitchTip, self-hosted. Before that, every error ended up in a log file inside the container that was a pain to get to. Whoever saw a 500 had seen it, and I had not.

Umami for the numbers. No cookie, no identifier in the browser: the only reason this site works without a consent banner.

Playwright for screenshots and browser checks. Contrast and overflow are things you measure, not things you guess.

At the desk

MacBook Air M3, 16 GB, 1 TB, the fanless one. I am still surprised that Docker, a database and a browser run on it at once without making a sound.

Next to it an Acer XZ342CK: 34 inches at 21:9, 3440 × 1440. Editor and browser side by side without shifting windows. That's the whole trick.

Beside that stands a PC for everything that does not run on the Mac, plus speakers and accessories from Anker: dock, cables, power supplies. Unspectacular, but none of it has let me down so far.

PhpStorm for writing. And Claude Code, which most of this site was built with. The design, the decisions and the review are mine; what I have not understood does not go into operation.

What is deliberately missing here

No analytics tool with cookies, no CDN, no fonts from Google, no icon library. Every outside address would be a connection to a third party on every page view, and this site promises there are none.