personal tech stack

see also: life design, my attempt at a minimum viable intentional personal tech stack;setup.

about

when i talk about personal tech stacks, i'm referring to the aggregate of all hardware and software you use. in an ideal world, we would always have local-first, agent-centric, humane free open-source software and open hardware, but within our societal context, that's not always feasible.

so a powerful outcome of taking a critical look at every piece of technology we use/create is having tremendous clarity on what trade-offs we're choosing to make as an effect our relationship with that tech.

so, before looking at exactly what a "personal tech stack" might look like, let's briefly outline the 2 major approaches to (humane) tech stack design.

2 approaches to tech stack design

1. create on top of the new, emergent decentralized/distributed architecture (web3/IPFS/holochain/solid promise), knowing that it's going to take a lot more work and some features won't be available, and/or
2. find ways to minimize the negative effects and adapt the existing systems/tools to be more intentional/humane/regenerative.

while we don't have the best of both worlds, we still have unmet functions - a goal of my curation is to bring clarity to that, to establish knowledge/resource commons and coordinate efforts.

for a long time, i've been trying to curate the "minimum viable intentional personal systems design;setup", which includes the tech stack. here's what i've been currently using: c4ss1us' tech stack notion database

for a deeper exploration into both of these, see:

• approach 1: personal OS design
• approach 2: adapt existing systems

breaking down a personal tech stack

hardware:

• laptop
• monitors
• phone
• e-reader
• tablet
• wearables
  • headphones
• other specialized electronic devices
  • microphone
  • camera
  • MIDI
  • raspberry pi
  • arduino
  • 3d printer
  • etc

software:

desktop:

• operating system
• desktop environment
• RSS / aggregators
• recommender systems / curation feeds
• social graphs
• browser
• bookmark manager
• file manager
• note-taking apps
  • plugins
• drawing/diagramming apps
• self-tracking tools
• other tools for:
  • communication, learning, sensemaking, publishing, processing, scraping, etc...

mobile:

• operating system
• apps
• widgets

at some point, i'd like to tag these with metadata - their ecological footprint (both what was necessary for building it and for continuing to use it), and for software - their size and usage data (included in quantified self tracking).

other valuable reflections

at which level does each tool operate?

data -> information -> knowledge -> creativity -> wisdom (content layers)

— other useful frames/breakdowns: action, decision, thoughts, plans, strategies...