Technology that Impresses Me

I have amassed fervent adoration for some select pieces of software throughout my career in technology. From databases to CLIs that either make my work easier, or just perform their tasks so well that I have come to rely on them as a point of reference for what makes software both good and practical.

Linux will always be my first love, but now that it has become such a predominant Operating System, I keep this ode mostly to myself unless I'm in the presence of other people who like to reminisce about compiling custom kernels, or early window managers like Enlightenment and WindowMaker. It opened both computing and the Internet for me, at a time when there were few people around me with deep knowledge of both. The open-source culture fostered my excitement and amplified my natural initiative.

This is a short list of software that I use and appreciate, along with some personal thoughts, screenshots, and excerpts based on my work and experience.

Rust

Rust is incredible. It's fast, memory safe, and the compiler is an incredible tool for understanding the design and practical implementation of the language. I've never used a programming language that has better tooling, documentation, and developer feedback.

WireGuard

WireGuard has allowed me to easily create private networks and bridge them with existing ones. I've been so impressed with the performance and implementation ideas, I've moved all of my devices onto private networks. This has helped immensely with all development and infrastructure testing.

ClickHouse

ClickHouse has been a godsend when it comes to working with extremely large datasets, especially for anything read-heavy. Anything regarding analytics, or data transformation, the speed of ClickHouse has made some previously impractical things practical. When I'm faced with a task that places serious demands on read queries, I reach for this database solution unless there are very good reasons to stick to classic solutions.

SQLite

What can be said about this that other's haven't already said. Honestly, it's simplicity and ease of rollout, effortlessly embeddable into nearly any software, it's an excellent starting point to development that can handle a ton of data before needing to look at more complex and costly implementations.

Helix Editor

Helix is a modern, terminal-based, modal text editor build in Rust. It is blazing fast and has native LSP support.

Tools and Utilities

skim

A tool modeled after fuzzy finder, skim is authored in Rust and includes full support for regular expressions.

jless

A JSON tool that eliminates the headaches of navigating large or unfamiliar data structures. This tool has saved me from countless page up/down keystrokes, and the frustration of watching indentation levels of deeply nested fields. When you make a new request, this can help you make sense of the data before working with it.