DX April 10, 2026 ·6 min

The dev environment I actually use in 2026

Containers: OrbStack — faster than Docker Desktop, half the RAM
Editor: Cursor with a tight ruleset and four sharp slash commands
Terminal: Ghostty + Starship + Atuin
DB: Postgres 16 with a snapshotted seed volume
Cache: Redis 7
Mail: Mailpit for local SMTP

Five years of YAML archaeology condensed into a setup that finally feels boring — in a good way.

Boring is the point

The best dev environment is one nobody remembers configuring. Here is mine.

Setup time for a new machine: 11 minutes. Down from 90.

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Module boundaries, build pipelines, and the lessons learned splitting one giant repo into something humans can actually navigate.

What changed in my workflow, what didn't, and the practices that 10x'd the value of the tools I already had.

Yes you can. No you probably shouldn't — until you should. Here is the decision tree.