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Uses

The tools I actually reach for

A running list of the tools I actually reach for — not gear-flexing, just what's earned a place. This is a living page; it changes as my work does.

This site / stack

Owned, fast, markdown-native — boring in the right ways.

  • Astro

    Builds the whole thing to static files. Pages assembled ahead of time, not per request.

  • Tailwind CSS

    Utility-first styling. The design tokens here (ember, ink) are Tailwind theme extensions.

  • MDX

    Markdown for the blog, with the option to drop in components when a post needs them.

  • Cloudflare Pages

    Hosts and serves the static build, plus a few Pages Functions. Free at my scale.

  • Self-hosted fonts

    Inter, Newsreader, and JetBrains Mono via Fontsource — no render-blocking Google Fonts request.

  • Generated OG cards

    Social share images built at build time from a script, so I never hand-make them.

  • Proton Mail

    Domain email for kennethlacroix.me. The records I guarded most carefully during the DNS cutover.

  • Git & GitHub

    Everything lives in a repo I control. Conventional commits, because legible history beats a tidy diff.

Building with AI

I build with AI as a pair programmer — I bring the judgment, it brings the speed.

  • Claude Code

    My AI pair programmer. Not a chatbot — a partner with the project context, mid-feature, so I can ask "why" in the moment.

  • gstack

    Structured workflow skills (Gary Tan) that plug into Claude Code — review, QA, planning, shipping. AI plus structure beats AI alone.

  • Rust

    The backend language for MoodHaven Journal. I learned it by shipping with it, not by waiting to feel expert enough.

  • Tauri

    Desktop shell for MoodHaven — Rust backend, small binary, native OS access.

  • Ollama

    Local language model for optional, fully-offline text processing — capability without anything leaving the machine.

Homelab & infra

Where I learn systems by running them.

  • Proxmox

    Virtualization host for the lab — VMs and LXC containers.

  • UniFi

    Access points and controller. I have poured their metrics into monitoring for the fun of it.

  • Zabbix

    Monitoring and alerting. Paired it with the UniFi Proxy project to pull AP metrics into the mix.

  • Grafana

    Graphs the Zabbix data — signal strength, client counts, WiFi health.

  • pfSense

    Software router for the domain lab — firewall rules and IPSec tunnels between virtual "offices".

  • VirtualBox

    Where the earliest homelab VMs lived. Cheap, disposable, good for breaking things on purpose.

  • Linux

    The substrate under most of the above. Containers, services, and a lot of config files.

IT day-to-day

The tools the actual job runs on.

  • PowerShell

    Automation and remediation — including a certificate-fix proof-of-concept that cut a lot of manual effort.

  • Python

    Scripting and automation to take repetitive work off the queue.

  • Bash

    Glue scripting on Linux hosts and in the homelab.

  • Active Directory

    Identity and access in the enterprise environments I have run.

  • VMware

    Enterprise virtualization in the infrastructure roles, alongside Proxmox at home.

For how this site itself was built — thought, design, and cutover in about a day — see A Lazy Sunday: Rebuilding My Site with AI.