Productivity

I have a confession: I spent years perfecting my dotfiles. Custom vim mappings, tmux prefix changed to Ctrl+a, fancy shell prompts, aliases for everything. My setup was perfect. And then I SSH’d into a production server to debug an issue, and I was useless. No custom mappings. No plugins. No aliases. Just vanilla vim with its default keybindings that I had completely forgotten. I fumbled around, couldn’t remember how to do basic navigation, and felt like a complete beginner. ...

I’ve been using the same .zshrc for years. And my .vimrc. And my tmux config. Over time they’ve grown into a carefully tuned system that does exactly what I want. The problem: I have multiple machines. A laptop, a desktop, sometimes a VM for testing. And keeping everything in sync was always… improvised. Finding the right dotfile management solution took me years. I tried everything. And I mean everything. The Long Search It started with the classic: a bare git repo in my home directory. git init --bare ~/.dotfiles, some aliases, done. It works, but it’s fragile. One wrong git clean and you’ve nuked your configs. And good luck with machine-specific settings. ...

You wake up. It’s dark. You hear a soft humming — fans, somewhere. Slowly your eyes adjust to the light. You find yourself in a container. Metal walls, a few windows looking out at… stars. Only stars. No Earth in sight. There’s a note: “You have everything you need to survive. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out. Good luck.” This is the thought experiment I regularly discuss when I’m in a philosophical mood with friends. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s actually a lens to think about systems thinking, circular processes, and — if you extrapolate — about how we treat the Earth. ...

I used KeePass for years. Then 1Password. Then Bitwarden. All decent tools, but they always felt… like too much. Too much UI, too many features, too much hassle to integrate properly into my workflow. Then I discovered pass. A password manager that does exactly what the name says: store passwords. Nothing more, nothing less. What is pass? Pass is the “standard unix password manager.” It’s a shell script of ~700 lines that stores passwords as GPG-encrypted files in a directory. That’s it. No database, no proprietary format, no built-in cloud sync. ...

GPG is one of those tools everyone “should learn someday” but nobody wants to. The documentation is overwhelming, the terminology confusing, and the error messages cryptic (pun intended). But GPG is also essential. It’s the foundation for pass, for signed git commits, for encrypted email, and for verifying software downloads. If you’re serious about security, you can’t avoid it. This is the guide I wish I had when I started. What is GPG actually? GPG (GNU Privacy Guard) is an implementation of the OpenPGP protocol. It does two things: ...