/uses
What I use day to day
Tools, stack, and services I build with, for client work and my own products. Updated occasionally as things change. Inspired by uses.tech.
Last updated May 2026
Stack
What I reach for, and roughly when each earns its keep.
- Astro: for marketing sites, content-heavy pages, and anything that wants to ship as static HTML. Painless content collections, almost no client JS by default, easy to drop in islands when needed. This site runs on it.
- Next.js: for stateful web apps where Astro stops paying off. Server components, route handlers, edge runtime when latency matters.
- React: default for any non-trivial interactive UI.
- TypeScript: non-negotiable. End to end, in scripts, in worker code, everywhere.
- Tailwind: when I'm shipping fast on a client project. For my own sites I sometimes prefer plain CSS with design tokens.
Data and backend
- Postgres: boring is good. Default database for everything.
- Supabase: managed Postgres + auth + storage. The fastest path from "I need a database" to "I'm shipping" without giving up SQL.
- Stripe: for any product that takes money. Checkout for one-off payments, Billing for subscriptions.
AI
- Anthropic Claude: primary LLM for AI features in client work and my own projects. Used where it earns its keep (parsing, summarising, structured extraction); avoided where it doesn't (generic chat surfaces, anywhere a plain rule would do).
Hosting and infrastructure
- Vercel: default host for Next.js apps. Preview deploys, edge functions, no-fuss DX.
- GitHub Pages: for static sites where I don't need server-side anything. This one runs on it.
- Cloudflare: DNS, and Workers for anything serverless that needs to live next to the static site (the contact form on this site, for example, is a Worker that forwards to Resend).
APIs and services
- Resend: transactional email. Clean API, sane pricing, doesn't pretend to be a marketing platform.
- Web3Forms: when a static site just needs a contact form and the email payload doesn't need shaping. Free tier covers most projects.
Design
- Figma: for any visual design before code. Wireframes, comps, component libraries. The shareable link beats screenshots back and forth.
Editor and dev environment
- VS Code: primary editor.
- Claude Code: pair-programming agent inside the editor and the terminal. Most of the boring scaffolding work happens through it now.
- Git + GitHub CLI: for everything version-controlled.
- PowerShell: daily-driver shell on Windows. Bash via Git Bash when a script needs POSIX.
