Uses

The gear and tooling I actually use, in the spirit of uses.tech.

Hardware

  • Primary dev box: a dedicated bare-metal server (AMD, 64 GB RAM, NVMe) at a European hosting provider — no laptop-grade thermal throttling, no cloud-VM noisy neighbors.
  • Access: Tailscale-only. The server has zero open ports on the public internet — SSH, dashboards, and internal services are reachable exclusively over the mesh VPN.
  • Client: a Windows workstation running a terminal — the server is where everything happens.
  • Failover browser/network: an Android phone reachable over the same mesh (ADB), used as an independent network path when the primary connection needs a second opinion.
  • Access validation: that posture is re-proven by a read-only check on a weekly cadence — primary mesh reachability, the phone failover path, and an external probe confirming nothing answers on the public internet. Runbook and evidence format: docs/notes/tailnet-failover-validation.md.

Terminal & editing

  • tmux — a fleet of named sessions; interactive sessions and headless agent workers live side by side, with systemd resource caps so a runaway build can't take down the box. The caps — a fleet-wide slice ceiling, a per-worker memory wall, and a per-build cgroup scope — are recorded with a read-only drift check: docs/notes/systemd-resource-caps.md.
  • Claude Code as the daily driver for interactive work; headless workers run through NEEDLE with HOOP as the observability plane.
  • Beads (file-backed issue queue) for work tracking across humans and agents.

Build & CI

  • cargo test transparently offloads to a Kubernetes CI cluster via a PATH shim when the tree is clean — logs stream back to the terminal; dirty trees fall back to a resource-capped local run (same caps, same record: docs/notes/systemd-resource-caps.md).
  • CI is Argo Workflows on a spot-priced Kubernetes cluster; GitHub Actions are disabled everywhere.
  • Deploys are GitOps: edit manifests in a config repo, push, let ArgoCD converge.

Services I self-host

  • Forgejo as the git source of truth, with server-side push-mirrors to GitHub.
  • OpenBao for secrets, ArgoCD for deployment, VictoriaLogs for logs.

This site

  • Astro on Cloudflare Pages; pushed to main → built by Argo → live. Content is markdown with a draft-first workflow so agents can ship drafts and a human flips them live.