Things I use

Primary IDE for Java and Spring Boot. The refactoring tooling and debugger alone make it worth the license.

Everything else — TypeScript, React, config files, this portfolio. Fast to open and stays out of the way.

Multiple panes and profiles with WSL. A long overdue upgrade from the default console.

Workhorse language for production backend services. Records, sealed classes, and pattern matching have made it considerably more pleasant to write.

REST APIs and service infrastructure. Convention over configuration — mostly stays out of the way until you need to go off-script.

Frontend, scripting, and any Node tooling. I don't write untyped JavaScript anymore.

This site is built on Astro with React islands. Islands architecture is the right call for a mostly-static portfolio that still needs interactive components.

Event streaming for payment flows. When you need guaranteed ordering and high throughput for financial transactions, the alternatives don't really compare.

Go-to relational database for greenfield work. Extensions, JSONB support, and a sane query planner.

For the financial systems that have been running since before I was born and aren't going anywhere.

Local dev and containerized deployments. Compose files for spinning up full service stacks with a single command.

Observability for production. Custom dashboards, APM traces, and log correlation — saved meaningful time during more than a few incidents.

CI/CD pipelines. TeamCity at Guidewire, Jenkins at Endava. They both get the job done.

AI coding assistant for non-trivial tasks — architecture discussion, code review, and this portfolio was largely built alongside it. The CLI integration keeps me in the terminal.

In-editor completions for the boilerplate I'd rather not type twice. Particularly useful for repetitive Java patterns.

API testing and collection management. Still the most practical tool for exploring REST APIs with teams.