A long-term reference for engineering principles, tooling decisions, and technical conventions.
This repository is not a collection of tricks.
It is a handbook.
A place to capture the decisions, principles, and conventions that survive:
- new machines
- new roles
- new companies
- new technologies
Engineering work is full of invisible decisions.
Over time, those decisions are:
- forgotten
- re-learned
- inconsistently applied
- rediscovered under pressure
This handbook exists to prevent that.
Its goal is simple:
Reduce cognitive load by making decisions explicit.
This repository documents:
- engineering principles I rely on
- tooling choices and their rationale
- conventions I apply consistently
- security and workstation baselines
- practices that scale over time
Not because they are perfect —
but because they are intentional.
This is not:
- a tutorial repository
- a dotfiles collection
- a list of fashionable tools
- a "best practices" dump
There is no attempt to be exhaustive.
If something is not written here, it is either:
- not important
- not stable enough
- or not worth remembering
A few principles guide everything documented here.
Tools change.
Reasoning lasts.
Whenever possible, this handbook explains why, not just what.
A consistent setup:
- reduces friction
- lowers error rates
- improves collaboration
Perfect setups rarely survive time.
Consistent ones do.
Every unnecessary choice consumes attention.
This handbook aims to eliminate repeated decisions by fixing them once.
Predictable systems scale.
Boring tools fail less.
Stability beats cleverness.
The structure follows intent, not technology.
personal-engineering-handbook/
├── principles/ # Engineering and architectural principles
├── tools/ # Tooling rationale and usage conventions
├── ai-tools/ # AI assistants setup and practices
├── security/ # Security baseline and practices
├── workstation/ # Machine setup and lifecycle
└── README.md
Sections may evolve, but the intent remains the same.
- as a personal reference
- as a memory extension
- as a reset point when context is lost
- as a baseline when setting up a new machine
It is written primarily for future me.
If it helps others, that is a welcome side effect.
This handbook is intentionally incomplete.
It grows when something proves:
- recurrent
- stable
- worth writing down
Anything temporary does not belong here.
Tools should disappear.
Decisions should remain.