Productivity

The first time it bit me I was halfway through a database migration over SSH. Train hit a tunnel, WiFi blinked, connection gone. The process running on the other end went with it. I sat there staring at a dead prompt wondering how much of the migration had actually committed. A terminal multiplexer would have saved me. The process keeps running on the server whether I’m attached or not, so a dropped connection becomes a non-event. I reconnect, reattach, and the work is exactly where I left it. That property alone is worth the setup cost, and it’s why I treat a multiplexer as part of the base layer on every machine I touch. ...

Here is how a lot of us work in 2026: a dotfiles repo with years of commits, a vim config that pulls in thirty plugins, a tmux prefix remapped to something more comfortable, a shell prompt that took a weekend to get right. The setup is yours, down to the last keybinding. On your laptop, you are fast. Muscle memory does the work and you barely think about the tools at all. That is the dream we sell ourselves, and most of the time it holds up fine. ...

My .zshrc is older than some of my coworkers’ careers. Same with my .vimrc and my tmux config. They’ve grown into a carefully tuned system that does exactly what I want, and I’d be lost without them. The problem is that I run multiple machines. A laptop, a desktop, sometimes a throwaway VM for testing. Keeping all of that in sync used to be a pile of improvised hacks held together by hope. ...

You wake up. It’s dark. Somewhere a fan is humming. Your eyes adjust. You’re in a container. Metal walls, a few small windows, and through them: stars. Just stars. No Earth anywhere. There’s a note taped to the wall: “You have everything you need to survive. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out. Good luck.” I bring this thought experiment up when I’m in the right mood with friends. It sounds like science fiction. What it actually does is strip away the thing most of us never question: the assumption that there is an “outside” that absorbs our mistakes and refills our supplies. ...

I used KeePass for years. Then 1Password. Then Bitwarden. All decent tools, but every one of them felt like too much. Too much UI, too many features, too much friction to wire into the way I actually work. Every time I reached for a password I was reaching across an app boundary, and that small interruption added up. Then I found pass. It does exactly what the name promises: it stores passwords. I want to walk you through it the way I learned it, starting with the one command that hooked me, then adding layers until you can see my full setup. ...