Uses

Six years old and still going. It comes everywhere with me and handles calls, quick edits, and writing on the move without complaint, which is honestly all I ask of it.

Stays on the desk and handles anything that needs actual power: intensive builds, long creative sessions, the kind of work where you start noticing how much RAM you have. The name is slightly ridiculous for a laptop but it earns it.

The dev environment lives on a VPS, accessed through Termius and kept alive in tmux so I can close the laptop, open a different one, and carry on mid-sentence. Claude Code does the actual work inside the terminal. At some point the bottleneck stopped being how fast I could write code and started being how clearly I could think.

Issue tracking for every SoundIn product and my own writing pipeline, and the only tool I’ve used long enough that the keyboard shortcuts feel like reflexes rather than something I had to learn.

Six years in and it’s still where thinking that isn’t ready to be a task yet goes to develop. Meeting notes, product specs, half-finished ideas, research that needs room to breathe. At this point it’s less a tool and more just how I think.

I spent longer than I’d like to admit thinking about pens before landing on this one. It’s light, reliable, takes standard cartridges, and has been boring enough that I stopped noticing it and started noticing what I was writing instead.

Every product decision, every half-formed idea, everything I’m not yet sure about starts here before it goes anywhere near a keyboard. Soft cover because hardback notebooks always feel like you’re supposed to be doing something more important than you are. Dot grid because ruled lines feel like school.