Stephane Mensah
Setup & Tools

What I Use

A living breakdown of the hardware, development setup, frameworks, and cloud services I rely on to build modern software.

Hardware & Workstation

  • Apple MacBook Pro (Apple Silicon)

    My primary daily driver. Whisper quiet, outstanding battery life, and effortless local container performance.

  • High-DPI External Display

    Crisp typography rendering and ample screen estate for side-by-side terminal, editor, and browser debugging.

  • Mechanical Keyboard & Precision Mouse

    Tactile switches for long coding sessions and smooth multi-gesture navigation.

  • Noise-Canceling Headphones

    Crucial for entering flow state and shutting out distractions during complex engineering tasks.

Editor & Terminal

  • Modern Code Editors (VS Code / Antigravity / Zed)

    Fast, minimalist editor environments with tailored dark mode palettes, minimal UI chrome, and robust language servers.

  • SF Mono & Fira Code Fonts

    Clean monospace typography with clear character distinction and subtle coding ligatures.

  • Zsh & Starship Shell

    Clean, fast prompt showing git status, node version, and execution times without terminal latency.

  • Ripgrep & Fzf

    Instant project-wide regex searching and fuzzy-finding across repositories.

Core Stacks & Frameworks

  • TanStack Start & React

    Full-stack React framework with server-side streaming, fine-grained routing, and end-to-end type safety.

  • Astro (v7+)

    The engine behind this portfolio and blog. Zero unnecessary client JS, blazing-fast static builds, and native Markdown/MDX.

  • Hono

    Ultrafast, lightweight web framework running seamlessly across Cloudflare Workers, Node.js, and edge runtimes.

  • Go (Golang)

    For high-concurrency proxies, microservices, and network utilities requiring minimal memory footprint.

  • Tailwind CSS (v4)

    Utility-first styling with modern CSS variables, fluid color tokens, and instant Vite integration.

  • TypeScript

    Strict typing across all layers, from database schemas to frontend components.

Cloud, Edge & Infrastructure

  • Cloudflare Workers & Edge Ecosystem

    Global serverless compute with Workers KV, R2 Object Storage, Queues, Workflows, and Edge Cache for sub-50ms worldwide latency.

  • Alchemy (alchemy.dev)

    Modern Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool used to declare, version, and deploy Cloudflare resources reproducibly.

  • Turso (libSQL)

    Edge-replicated SQL database built on SQLite with instantaneous cold starts and zero maintenance.

  • Appwrite

    Backend-as-a-service providing secure asset storage and background server functions.

  • Coolify (Self-Hosted PaaS)

    Open-source cloud manager used on VPS instances for orchestrating Docker containers, proxies, and web services.

  • Upstash Redis

    Serverless, low-latency Redis for global rate limiting, session persistence, and API caching.

  • Doppler

    Centralized secrets orchestration for continuous, encrypted environment variable sync across teams and environments.

Productivity & Utilities

  • Raycast

    Spotlight replacement with custom extensions, window management, and rapid clipboard history.

  • Telegram Bots & API

    My favorite conversational interface for alerting, real-time control, and services like @UnrollItBot.

  • Arc & Chrome

    Modern tab management, profile separation, and powerful devtools for performance audits.

  • Obsidian

    Local-first markdown knowledge base for architectural sketches, technical notes, and draft outlines.