Development on Technical Notes

A Decent Windows

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This post is about deflating, removing what I personally believe is unnecessary in Windows 11. In English they call it debloat or bloatware removal. In this post I explain how to do it on a fresh Windows install, but it also works on an existing one.

The point is to remove apps, services and pre-installed junk that aren’t essential, consume resources and worst of all, affect performance and UX.

VMWare on Windows

Mon, 26 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Virtualization allows running multiple operating systems on the same machine without making changes to the main disk. In this post I show how I install VMWare Workstation Pro as a host on a Windows 11 Pro and how I create a Windows 11 Pro Guest without TPM 2.0, for the purpose of having an isolated development environment.

Windows for Development

Sun, 25 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this post I describe the steps to set up a Windows 11 machine as a development workstation for a cross-platform environment — Linux, macOS, and Windows. This is not oriented towards Microsoft/Windows-only software development, but rather for those who like to develop on and for multiple platforms and environments.

I start from a clean Windows installation (in English), with nothing installed. I took advantage of needing to set up a dual boot and configured the operating system in a lightweight manner. The post starts with the CLI and WSL2, and in the second part I cover the tools and programming languages.

A Decent Windows (Obsolete)

Sat, 24 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this post I explain how I configure a Windows 11 that I’m going to use for software development, testing or demos. I don’t need frills since it won’t have sensitive data, I want its essence, bare-bones, with few applications, some browsing and that’s it. In the end it became a technical exercise – removing everything I can, ads, Edge, extras, installing minimal drivers, a local account, having it boot and be available as soon as possible.

Note: a year later I decided to create a new decent Windows 11 (2025).

Dualboot Linux Windows

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Dualboot means having two operating systems on the same computer and choosing which one to boot during the boot phase. My goal is to prepare my PC for dualboot and install Windows 11 Pro. Normally you install Windows first and then Linux, but in my case I already have Linux (Ubuntu) working perfectly and using the entire 4TB disk.

I’m going to “add” Windows to enable dualboot. I describe the entire process, how I did it, how I resized the hard drive, added Windows and customized the boot menu.

Linux for Development

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this post I describe my configuration log for setting up a Linux (Ubuntu) machine as a development workstation. I install several graphical and command-line applications that are essential for my workflow.

Starting from a fresh Ubuntu installation, the installation order can be varied, but I recommend (if your Ubuntu is freshly installed) that you follow the same order to see the same results.

Terminals with tmux

Thu, 25 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

tmux is a terminal multiplexer that allows you to have multiple sessions (shells) in a single window. From your Mac, Linux, or even Windows (with WSL) terminal, in a single window you can have multiple active sessions, switch between them, view them simultaneously, enter one and disconnect (they keep running in the background), and reconnect to it in the future.

Goodbye Bash, Hello Zsh!

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve decided to migrate my CLI from the reliable and well-known bash to the powerful and versatile zsh. It’s an extended evolution of the Bourne Shell (sh) – it not only inherits many of Bash’s familiar features but also introduces a series of new functionalities, plugin support, and custom themes. Apple adopted Zsh as the default shell some time ago, and I still needed to make the switch on my Linux systems, including WSL2 on Windows.

Customizing VSCode

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this post I cover how to customize VSCode. I work with GitHub in a cross-platform, multi-account environment and want to sync my settings, use the same extensions, and leverage licenses. I explain the multi-account topic, synchronization of my global and per-project preferences (settings), and extensions.

I normally use Windows, Linux, and macOS, and I’ve chosen VSCode as my editor/IDE. The goal is to have a unified work experience – launch VSCode on any operating system, clone a personal or professional project, keeping the same extensions and settings, and even using the options to connect to a host, tunnel, WSL, etc.

MAC with Vagrant

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Vagrant lets you create and configure virtual development environments that are lightweight and reproducible. It does so by creating virtual machines and requires a Hypervisor. It doesn’t care which hypervisor you use – it supports VirtualBox, KVM, Docker, VMWare, and 30+ others. It’s a fantastic tool for spinning up Servers for our software development projects.

This guide only works, for now, with INTEL chips. I haven’t been able to make it work on a Mac with ARM (Apple Silicon) as the host yet.

MAC for Development

Sat, 15 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this post I describe my configuration log for setting up a Mac (INTEL or ARM) as a development machine. I install several graphical and command-line applications that are important for using a Mac as a development workstation.

The installation order can be varied, but this is what I recommend starting from a fresh macOS installation.

Vagrant with Libvirt KVM

Sat, 15 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Vagrant creates and runs virtual machines, relying on virtualization providers such as Virtualbox, KVM, Docker, VMWare, and 30+ others. It will always default to launching the VM with Virtualbox unless we explicitly specify a different provider. In this guide I explain how I set up Vagrant with the Libvirt KVM provider on Linux.