Tools that give you your day back
A hands-on guide to the tools that cut the repetition out of IT work — terminals, search, editors, AI assistants, Git, APIs, containers, automation, and the free-tier stack you ship on. Every page follows the same shape: why it matters → how to install it → the handful of commands you’ll actually use. Five minutes each.
MIT licensed. Every page is plain Markdown — fork it, adapt it, drop it into your own handbook.
Fifteen categories, one hundred and twenty-four tools
Start wherever your friction is. Read straight through and you go from an empty terminal to a deployed, observable product that takes payments.
Getting Started
Writing a bootable USB with Rufus, how to pick a tool worth installing, package managers on every OS, and keeping your config in dotfiles.
Terminal & Shell
Terminal apps, zsh with Starship, tmux sessions, fzf fuzzy finding, zoxide for jumping between directories, and hyperfine for benchmarking.
Files & Search
ripgrep, fd, bat, eza, and jq — modern replacements for grep, find, cat, and ls — plus ast-grep for code structure and MinerU or Docling for documents.
Editors & IDEs
The first settings that matter in VS Code, Neovim, and JetBrains, plus editing skills that survive a switch.
AI Coding Tools
Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor, Ollama and Freebuff, plus the layer around them: Graft, Codebase Memory MCP, Agency Agents, OpenMontage, HyperFrames, Composio, Exa.
Git & Collaboration
A real daily Git workflow including how to undo things, plus gh, Gitea, Forgejo and GitLab for a forge you host yourself, lazygit, delta, hunk, and pre-commit hooks.
Network & APIs
curl, HTTPie, Bruno and Postman, opening a local server to the internet, Tailscale for a private network between your machines, and AutoCLI.
Containers & Deploys
Docker and Podman, Kubernetes with Helm, Kustomize, Istio and policy, six CI/CD tools, Nexus and Harbor, Terraform and Ansible, secrets, scanning, and Backstage.
Observability & Reliability
Prometheus, Grafana, Loki and OpenTelemetry for the four signals, k6 for load tests, chaos experiments, and OpenCost for the bill.
Security
Semgrep for source patterns, gitleaks for secrets, Sigstore for signing, ZAP against the running app, and Wazuh watching the hosts.
Automation & Shortcuts
Raycast, PowerToys, Makefiles, cron and launchd, and n8n for wiring services together.
Linux Desktop
Zen Browser for the days that end with forty tabs, Webapp Manager to make websites real apps, and Zathura for reading PDFs from the keyboard.
Docs & Notes
Obsidian and Joplin, the Markdown you actually need, Mermaid diagrams that live in your diffs, Excalidraw, and two AI office suites — GenOffice and BatiOffice.
Vibe Coding Infra
The free-tier stack behind a solo-built product: Railway and Fly.io, Vercel and Workers, Neon and Supabase, Upstash, R2, Clerk, Resend, Inngest, PostHog, and getting paid.
AI Media Tools
Browser tools for the assets a project needs: Raphael and Krea for images, Magnific for upscaling, Clipdrop for edits, ElevenLabs and Gemini TTS for voice.