tools
Reviews, comparisons, and practical guides for developer tools, IDEs, CLI utilities, and software that enhances the development experience.
4 articles
How This Website Works: A Technical Look at the Stack
Ammar Najjar · July 19, 2026 · 19 min readIn a companion article, I wrote about why I rebuilt this website with Astro and how that decision grew into a much larger project. That article was about the journey and the thinking. This one is about the outcome: how the website actually works, every layer from writing a post to it appearing in a reader's browser.
Read more →Nine Years on GitHub Pages, Why I Finally Moved to Cloudflare
Ammar Najjar · July 3, 2026 · 9 min readFor nearly nine years, my personal website lived on GitHub Pages. It was free, reliable, and required almost no maintenance, so why migrate? A recent move to Cloudflare Pages prompted this post, which covers the motivation behind the change, the migration process, the issues encountered, and the trade-offs discovered along the way.
Read more →Local AI on a MacBook Pro with 16 GB RAM: What Actually Works
Ammar Najjar · June 14, 2026 · 9 min readRunning AI coding assistants locally sounds appealing: no API costs, your code stays on your machine, and you get a Claude Code-like experience for free. But getting it to actually work well on a 16 GB MacBook Pro M1 takes more trial and error than most guides admit.
Read more →Essential Development Tools: My Brewfile Setup
Ammar Najjar · February 23, 2026 · 9 min readAs a software engineer, our toolset shapes how we work and what we can accomplish. Over time, I've curated a collection of essential tools that boost my productivity and make development more enjoyable. Here's a breakdown of my Homebrew setup, featuring the tools I use daily.
Read more →