A personal technology radar to track tools, techniques, platforms, and languages/libraries I am exploring or using. Organized into quadrants and rings inspired by the ThoughtWorks format.

There are four quadrants on the radar.

  1. Techniques - Processes, methods, or approaches to software development.
  2. Tools - Software or utilities that support development, deployment, or operations.
  3. Platforms - Frameworks, cloud services, or infrastructure tools.
  4. Languages & Frameworks - Programming languages or frameworks used in development.

Each technology moves between different states of adopt and trial. This is a change from ThoughtWorks' own Technology Radar, which uses Adopt, Trial, Assess, and Hold.

  • Adopt: Proven and widely accepted technologies or approaches I use regularly.
  • Trial: Technologies I’m testing in real projects to evaluate their value.
Auto-generated description: A circular chart is divided into four quadrants labeled Techniques, Tools, Platforms, and Languages & Frameworks, with numbered blue and green circles distributed across the sections.

Techniques

Adopt

  1. Shape Up - It is definitely more suited to teams and organisations out of the box, but I’ve managed to make it work with a few tweaks for my own projects.
  2. Test-driven development - It’s taken me a long time to get into the right cycle for this, but I am doing it and seeing the benefits of it.

Trial

  1. Coventional Commits - A specification for adding better meaning to commit messages.

Tools

Adopt

  1. Ghostty - A now heavy user of this terminal emulator at work and home.
  2. GitHub - Having bounced between GitLab and GitHub, I believe the latter is the better fit for me in terms of cost and feature set. GitLab is still a great alternative, but I need to invest more in all the features they have to migrate over.
  3. VS Code - A great performing editor with a vast feature set and an active community behind it.
  4. Ruby VIPS - I’ve used this for the last few years to generate images with Ruby.

Trial

  1. Zed - Always looking for a new text editor, Zed has been a good alternative to VS Code.
  2. Sentry - Application monitoring for my Rails apps.
  3. GitKraken - A growing user of their VS Code plugin GitLens.
  4. Kamal - I’m still looking into Kamal to see if it can simplify some of my Rails projects and their hosting.

Platforms

Adopt

  1. AWS - Mostly used for the S3 service they provide.
  2. DigitalOcean - Cloudinfrastructure for developers. I use a mix of server and RDBMS hosting from DigitalOcean.
  3. Hatchbox - Rails hosting made simple for small businesses.
  4. Docker - I was very late to the Docker game but now use it daily.

Trial

Nothing on trial at the moment.

Languages & Frameworks

Adopt

  1. Ruby - My goto language for most things.
  2. Ruby on Rails - Not many frameworks offer so much out of the box. Glad to have been using Ruby on Rails for over 10 years.

Trial

  1. Three.js - I’m building a turn-based TPG game using this. A good exploratory project.
  2. TypeScript - I’m also using TypeScript with the above game.

Change log

Newest entries are at the top

January 2025

  • Creation of radar.

Notes

  • This radar is updated periodically based on my experiences and evaluations.
  • Technologies listed here may shift between rings/quadrants over time as I gain insights.