4 tools
My Daily Coding Stack
I'm a backend engineer at a startup. This is what I actually have open every day — not what I planned to use when I started, but what stuck after six months.
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Public stack
What I use to maintain an OSS project with 600+ GitHub stars and 30+ contributors. Everything is either free for open source or cheap enough I never think about the bill.
Workflow stack
CI/CD for free
Automated tests, linting, and release builds on every push. 2,000 minutes per month free for public repos — more than enough for a healthy open source project.
Open tool profileReproducible builds
A Docker Compose file that spins up the app and all dependencies in two commands. Contributors don't fight setup; they clone, run one command, and start contributing.
Open tool profileDatabase
Every contributor runs Postgres locally through Docker. The production schema and development schema are the same migration file — no surprises when deploying.
Open tool profileRoadmap tracking
Faster than GitHub Projects for managing my own roadmap and coordinating larger contributions. Two minutes to sync with GitHub issues is worth the cleaner planning interface.
Open tool profileRelated stacks
I'm a backend engineer at a startup. This is what I actually have open every day — not what I planned to use when I started, but what stuck after six months.
Built this so client calls do not die in random docs. Record once, summarize fast, and push the next steps into the tools I already use.
The stack I use every Sunday night to clean up priorities, reset the calendar, and head into Monday with a real plan.
Personal $0: Desktop, Engine, Hub (100 pulls/hr logged in), 1 private repo, 1 Scout-enabled repo; Pro ~$9/mo yearly (~$11 monthly) with unlimited Hub pulls; Team ~$15/mo yearly (~$16 mo); Business ~$24/user/mo with SSO and registry policies (docker.com/pricing).
PostgreSQL uses the PostgreSQL License (liberal, BSD-style)—$0; RDS, Cloud SQL, Neon, Supabase, etc. bill for compute and storage (postgresql.org, March 2026).
Issue tracking that feels fast: keyboard-first triage, cycles, and AI assists baked into how engineering work actually moves.
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