Equipment Manifest — Rev. 14

What I Use

Everything on my desk, in my terminal, and running in my head. Updated when something earns or loses its place.

Kiran Deshmukh Systems Engineer Last audit: 2026-02-18 34 items cataloged
HW

Hardware

4 items
HW-01 ●●●●○

MacBook Pro 16" M3 Max

Primary machine · 64GB · 1TB

The machine disappears. That's the highest compliment I can give. Compiles are fast enough that I never context-switch away waiting. Battery lasts through a full day of SSH sessions and Docker containers. I'd want 2TB storage — 1TB fills up faster than you think when you're hoarding VM images.
HW-02 ●●●●●

ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 12

Linux workstation · Fedora 41 · 32GB

My actual favorite machine. The keyboard is better than the Mac's by a mile. Runs Fedora with zero fuss. I deploy from this more than the Mac because the Linux environment matches prod. ThinkPads earn trust — this is my fifth one.
HW-03 ●●●○○

Custom NAS — 4-bay Fractal Node

TrueNAS Scale · 4×8TB WD Red Plus

Overkill for my needs, but I sleep better knowing my data lives on hardware I control. ZFS is non-negotiable. The Fractal case runs dead silent. Would I build it again? Probably not — I'd just get a Synology and save the weekends I spent debugging SATA controllers.
HW-04 ●●●●○

Raspberry Pi 5 (×3)

Homelab cluster · K3s · monitoring

Three of them running K3s for monitoring, DNS (Pi-hole), and a Grafana stack. Cheap enough that I don't care if one dies. The Pi 5 is genuinely fast enough for light workloads now — the USB 3 and PCIe actually make it usable as a real server.
PR

Peripherals

5 items
PR-01 ●●●●●

Dell U2723QE

27" 4K IPS · USB-C hub · 90W PD

One cable from laptop to monitor — power, display, USB hub, ethernet. That single cable changed my daily setup from a 3-minute ritual to just sitting down. The panel is accurate enough for everything except color grading, which I don't do.
PR-02 ●●●●●

HHKB Professional Hybrid Type-S

Topre · 45g · blank keycaps

The only keyboard where I forget I'm typing. Topre feels like typing on a cloud that fights back just enough. Blank keycaps because I type by feel and it keeps people from borrowing it. The Ctrl-in-caps-lock layout is correct and I will die on this hill.
PR-03 ●●●○○

Logitech MX Master 3S

Wireless · multi-device

It's fine. The scroll wheel is great for logs. Multi-device switching works between Mac and ThinkPad. But honestly, I spend 90% of my time in the terminal — the mouse is for browsers and Slack. I could use a $20 mouse and barely notice.
PR-04 ●●●●○

Sony WH-1000XM5

ANC headphones · USB-C · 30hr

The noise cancellation is the feature. Open office + on-call rotations = I need silence on demand. Sound quality is good, not audiophile-good. They creak a bit at the hinges after a year. The case is too big.
PR-05 ●●●●○

CalDigit TS4

Thunderbolt 4 dock · 18 ports

Absurd number of ports. Ethernet, audio, USB-A for legacy hardware, SD card slot I use once a year. The thing just works — I've never had to reset it, which puts it ahead of every other dock I've owned.
DK

Desk & Environment

4 items
DK-01 ●●●●○

Fully Jarvis Standing Desk

60×30" bamboo top · programmable

I stand maybe 30% of the day. The memory presets mean I actually use it — one button, no fiddling. Bamboo top has aged well. The wobble at standing height is real but tolerable. Cable management underneath is a nightmare I've accepted.
DK-02 ●●●●●

Herman Miller Aeron (Size B)

Remastered · fully loaded · graphite

Bought used for ₹45k. Best money I've ever spent on work equipment. My back stopped hurting in week two. The mesh breathes in Indian summers. I will repair this chair until it outlives me. If you sit 8+ hours and don't have a good chair, fix that first — before any tech upgrade.
DK-03 ●●●○○

BenQ ScreenBar Halo

Monitor light bar · wireless dial

Lights the desk without reflecting on the screen. The wireless dial is overengineered — I set it once and forget it. Does exactly one thing well. Overpriced for what it is, but every alternative I tried had worse mounting.
DK-04 ●●●●○

Whiteboard — 4×3 ft

Wall-mounted · magnetic

My most important debugging tool. When a system is too complex to hold in my head, it goes on the whiteboard. Architecture diagrams, incident timelines, dependency graphs. Digital tools can't replace the speed of just drawing boxes and arrows. I photograph it before erasing — that's my documentation process.
DV

Dev Tools

6 items
DV-01 ●●●●●

Neovim

Editor · v0.10+ · Lua config

My config is 800 lines of Lua I've refined over three years. telescope treesitter lsp-zero — these three plugins cover 90% of what I need. I tried VS Code for six months. It's good software. I went back because modal editing is how my brain works now. The speed of thought-to-action in Neovim is unmatched.
DV-02 ●●●●○

Git + LazyGit

Version control · TUI

Raw git for simple stuff, LazyGit for interactive rebases and complex history surgery. I know the git CLI well enough that I could live without LazyGit. I don't want to. The staging interface alone saves me 20 minutes a day.
DV-03 ●●●○○

Docker / Podman

Containers · rootless on Linux

Docker on Mac, Podman on the ThinkPad. I'm slowly migrating to Podman everywhere because rootless and daemonless is just better for production parity. Docker Compose is still more ergonomic for local dev. The whole ecosystem is a mess of competing standards and I've accepted that.
DV-04 ●●●●○

Go

Primary language · 4 years

Boring in the best way. Single binary deploys. Fast compilation. The standard library covers most of what I need. I miss generics-before-generics-existed less than I thought I would. When I need to write a tool that runs on 15 different servers, Go is the answer every time.
DV-05 ●●●●○

Python

Scripting · automation · glue

For everything Go is too heavy for. Quick scripts, data munging, Ansible modules, one-off analysis. I use uv now instead of pip/venv — it's dramatically faster. Python is the duct tape of my toolkit: not glamorous, holds everything together.
DV-06 ●●●●●

Nix

Reproducible environments · flakes

The learning curve nearly killed me. Six months of pain. But now my dev environments are completely reproducible across Mac and Linux. nix develop and I'm ready. New machine? Clone the flake, run one command. I can't go back to manually managing dependencies. The documentation is terrible — I learned from reading other people's configs.
TM

Terminal

5 items
TM-01 ●●●●●

Ghostty

Terminal emulator · GPU-accelerated

Switched from Kitty. Ghostty is fast, native-feeling on macOS, and the config is sane. Font rendering is the best I've seen in a terminal. The split/tab system is good enough that I use it alongside tmux, not instead of it.
TM-02 ●●●●○

tmux

Multiplexer · .tmux.conf 200 lines

Prefix is Ctrl-A (screen muscle memory from 2015). I use it on every remote server — the session persistence is the killer feature. SSH drops? tmux doesn't care. My config has vim-style pane navigation and a minimal status bar. I've tried Zellij — it's promising but tmux is too embedded in my hands.
TM-03 ●●●●○

fish shell

Shell · no oh-my-anything

Autosuggestions and syntax highlighting out of the box — no plugin manager needed. Yes, it's not POSIX. I don't care — my scripts use #!/bin/sh or #!/usr/bin/env bash and my interactive shell is for me, not for portability. The tab completion is the best of any shell.
TM-04 ●●●●●

Berkeley Mono

Monospace typeface · paid

Worth every cent. The letter spacing, the distinct characters (0 vs O, 1 vs l vs I), the ligatures I actually want — it's the most readable monospace I've used. I tried 20+ free alternatives before buying this. None came close. The italic variant is beautiful in comments.
TM-05 ●●●●○

CLI Toolkit

ripgrep fd bat eza jq fzf

The modern Unix toolkit. ripgrep replaced grep so completely I've aliased it. fd is find-but-useful. fzf turns everything into a fuzzy-searchable list — piping into fzf is my most common shell pattern. These aren't optional for me anymore. They're the shell.
AP

Apps

5 items
AP-01 ●●●●○

Firefox

Browser · uBlock Origin · hardened

I use Firefox on principle and because the dev tools are genuinely good for CSS debugging. Chrome for testing only. My user.js has about 40 hardened settings. I'll keep using Firefox until it dies or becomes Chrome — whichever comes first.
AP-02 ●●●●○

Obsidian

Notes · local markdown · git sync

Plain markdown files synced via git. No vendor lock-in. I have 2,400+ notes going back to 2021 — runbooks, architecture decisions, meeting notes, debugging journals. The graph view is pretty but useless. The daily notes + backlinks are where the real value is.
AP-03 ●●●○○

Slack

Team chat · reluctantly

I wish I didn't need this. It eats RAM, the search is mediocre, the notification system is hostile to focus. But it's where my team lives, so I live there too. Heavy use of /remind and mute channel. Status is permanently set to 🔇.
AP-04 ●●●●●

Raycast

Launcher · clipboard · snippets

Replaced Alfred + Rectangle + a bunch of scripts. The clipboard history alone justifies it. I have custom scripts for: SSH into any server (via fzf-style search), creating Jira tickets, converting timestamps. It's the glue between GUI and CLI worlds.
AP-05 ●●●●○

WireGuard

VPN · self-hosted · homelab access

Connects me to my homelab from anywhere. Config is 20 lines. It just works — I forget it's running. The kernel module approach means near-zero overhead. I ran OpenVPN for years before this. Going back would feel like going back to dialup.
IF

Infrastructure

3 items
IF-01 ●●●●○

Terraform + OpenTofu

IaC · migrating to OpenTofu

Everything is code. If I can't destroy and recreate it from a repo, it shouldn't exist. Migrating to OpenTofu after the license change — the API is identical so it's painless. State management is still the worst part of the Terraform ecosystem. I use S3 + DynamoDB locking and it's fine but not elegant.
IF-02 ●●●●○

Prometheus + Grafana

Monitoring · alerting · dashboards

PromQL is ugly but powerful. My alert rules are obsessively tuned — I'd rather miss an alert than get a false one (alert fatigue kills). Grafana dashboards for everything: host metrics, app metrics, SLO burn rates. I spend too much time making dashboards pretty. It's my version of interior decorating.
IF-03 ●●●●●

Ansible

Config management · 60+ playbooks

YAML isn't a programming language, and that's Ansible's superpower and curse. I have playbooks for everything from bootstrapping a new laptop to deploying a Kubernetes cluster. Idempotency is the feature — I run playbooks repeatedly as a form of drift detection. It's not sexy, but it's reliable, and reliable wins.
CR

Daily Carry

3 items
CR-01 ●●●●●

Aer Travel Pack 3

Backpack · 35L · laptop + tech kit

Fits the 16" MacBook, chargers, cables, a change of clothes, and lunch. The organization is obsessive in the best way — everything has a pocket. I've taken this on 50+ flights as a carry-on. The fabric doesn't show wear. It's the most "systems engineer" backpack: overbuilt, modular, practical.
CR-02 ●●●●○

Leuchtturm1917 A5 Dotted

Notebook · black · numbered pages

For meetings where opening a laptop feels wrong, and for thinking that needs to be nonlinear. I fill about one every four months. The numbered pages + index system means I can actually find things later. Pen: Uni-ball Signo 0.38mm — fine enough for tiny margin notes.
CR-03 ●●●○○

YubiKey 5C NFC (×2)

Hardware auth · FIDO2 · backup pair

One on my keychain, one in the NAS cabinet. Every service that supports hardware keys gets one registered. SSH keys live on the YubiKey via PIV. The NFC works with my phone for 2FA on the go. It's the single best security investment I've made — better than any password manager alone.