Tech Lead Software Setup – 2024 Edition

Have you asked yourself what do you really need? Without the noise, without the hassle.

Here’s

and some extras!

!important; The links of this post contain NO referral links and I’ve got zero monies to create this list. Everything you’re about to read is my experience and opinion, enjoy!

BYE BYE VSCode. Hello VSCodium!

Straight to the point; Why would I want to send telemetry and tracking data to Microsoft all the time?

VSCodium contains the community-driven Open Source, freely-licensed binaries of VSCode with a beautiful icon that suits my desktop better!

Code Companion AI Autocompletion

Apparently, Github Copilot requires Microsoft’s distributed version of VSCode (wondering why ) and that led me to seek alternatives, now I’m glad I did!

Here’s Codeium, which has a FREE individual plan, and has proven more useful to me than copilot, honestly.

The context awareness amongst the project is quite superior and I’m now using the paid version instead the Copilot paid one.

I assume they might train the model further if you use the free version but didn’t read the Terms & Conditions. It was sunday morning. I apologize. Shall you do please tell me

VSCodium plugins

Less is more.

VSCode/VSCodium has improved on every update, linkedEditing settings drove “Auto rename tag” extension obsolete, “bracket pair colorizer” is now the default behaviour in VSCodium, so it’s yet another extension that you no longer need and so on and so forth.

On the other hand certain extensions like Codeium made others obsolete, like anything related to “code snippets”.

Now here’s the full list of extensions I really use:

• Codeium explained before
• Better comments it adds visual and mental order for me
• GitLens the Good Ol’ Git Lens, if you didn’t tested it yet, give it a shot!
• Material Icon Theme Having the proper icon for each thingy, is it too much to ask? This icon theme solves that for you. It even helps by adding easy to grasp icons for common directories like core, utils, dist and much more!
• Prettier Undoubtedly one of the most beloved extensions, specially when you enable “formatOnSave” along prettier as default formatter.

And that’s been the entire plugins list I’m afraid.
It’s not that I’ve suddenly become lazy and don’t want to write any more I promise, this is really the extensions I’m using right now.

In certain projects I can have the Python extensions as well, maybe Language Support for Java or any other language I might be fiddling around with. Maybe some test-related extension if it’s any good (Playwright, Jest…) depending on the needs of what I’m doing!!

Tip:

Remember that you can create profiles in VSCodium > Settings > Profiles, each with its very own set of extensions, this way you don’t need to manually disable the heavy language/platform specific extensions when you work in other kind of projects, avoiding weird behaviours and/or crashes!

Browser

Who would have told me that we would be talking about browsers in 2024?

• Isn’t Chrome the king? -Despite tracking the soul out of you-
• Isn’t Safari so shitty that’s considered the new IE?
• Isn’t Firefox so RAM consuming that’s better to just leave it to the QA team?
• Isn’t Opera / Opera GX buggy and crashy?
• Isn’t Brave dead after they added third party ads, trackers and crypto scams (the exact oposite of their selling point)?
• Is Epiphany something more than a medium to install Chromium in certain Linux distributions?

Aren’t you tired of browsers that look the same, do almost the same, each one with it’s flaws? SO DID I.

I recently discovered Arc which I’ve read that “it’s not a browser” somewhere even though is developed and published by “The Browser Company”

I’m not yet using all the features (I’m getting old, bear with me), here’s what I love the most as for now:

• It has “Spaces” to keep your contexts separated (e.g. job space, personal space…).
• You can create folders in each space as well, which allows me to store tabs per project.
• Contextual AI; honestly didn’t used it that much because I’m used to the old fashioned way, but I’m slowly getting there!
• Little Arc. Being Arc the default browser, when you open a link from Meet/Teams/Discord, your email or any other source external to Arc, it opens it inside a “little Arc” which you can simply close when you’re done (e.g. SSO login pop-up) or hit the maximise button to add it to your “Big Arc”!
• Two tabs at the same time! I’m currently using the split view feature, here have a look:

You can also drag the separator to make one side or the other larger or set up the tabs vertically instead (useful when using my secondary monitor which I’ve rotated 90 degrees).

Being used to other browsers it was a clunky experience the first day, not gonna lie, but an amazing one after a couple of days more, so much so that that’s now my main browser!

Who asked for more AI?

I’ve been testing Faraday with a couple or three of different Mistral-based models, just as GPT-like helper.

If you’re interested in task-specific models such improvisation, role play, long conversations and so on you can also find a ton of them in the “Manage Models” menu, so you can download and then link the one you want to test to existing or new “AI Characters”.

MORE AI? REALLY?

The previous one was for funzies, just to fiddle around but this one… oh boy, this one’s a MUST!

WARP Terminal allows for seamless copy paste, it remembers previous commands and suggest them to you while you type and many more goodies

You won’t regret checking the “Reusable Workflows” feature!

THE END

Share your favourite tools in the comment section!