Introduction

When programming, I want to work in something made for me — not a mass‑produced setup for the big market. I like it personal, and I don’t mind if it’s a bit rough around the edges.

By PDE (personal developer environment), I mean the tools, workflows, and configs that make you effective and give you the freedom to change what doesn’t fit. For me that’s mostly Neovim, a terminal, and a touch of Emacs.

It’s like a chef’s knife: every kitchen has knives, but the chef’s own knife is sharper and fits perfectly in the hand.

The Problem with IDEs

VS Code and other IDEs are crammed with buttons. For me it’s overwhelming — I don’t want to visually search for icons to perform tasks. I’d rather learn key combinations that become muscle memory.

All those buttons can also hide important understanding. Imagine a new .NET developer who only knows VS Code or Visual Studio: how do they build without the hammer icon? How do they start without the play button? With a PDE, you know what’s happening under the hood. Even if you add buttons, you understand what’s behind them — which makes it easier to work on servers, pipelines, or fresh systems.

When the IDE is Too Smart

I once worked in a code base with many tests. Everything looked fine in my IDE, but the build server kept failing. I tried cleaning, rebooting — same result. Finally, I ran the exact same test command as the server. Bingo: failures.

The IDE had been running tests in a “safe” order, masking a bug caused by test dependencies. It felt smooth until reality hit the pipeline. Too much IDE magic can give you a false sense of security.

Lessons Learned: Don’t Overdo Customization

My early PDE mistake was going all in on customization. You can burn hours tweaking configs and never learn if the defaults were actually fine. Now I stick with defaults until something really bothers me.

This way, I can install tmux on a new system and get productive immediately, with less config to maintain and fewer surprises.

Closing Reflection

A PDE doesn’t need to be fancy — it just needs to be yours. Like a chef’s knife, it should feel natural in your hand and make you sharper at your craft.