What we run on
Uses
The hardware, software, and services Alsheikh Media runs on. Updated occasionally; honest about what's actually in daily use.
Hardware
- Workstation: Apple Silicon laptop.
- Display: External monitor.
- Keyboard: External mechanical keyboard.
- Pointer: Trackpad / mouse.
- Audio: Over-ear headphones for calls and writing.
- Camera & lighting: Mirrorless camera and a soft key light for journal and video work.
- Phone: iPhone.
Software & dev
- Editor: VS Code.
- Terminal: Ghostty.
- Browser: Safari for day-to-day; Chrome for dev tooling; Firefox for extension testing.
- Site framework: Astro — static-first, islands where needed.
- Language: TypeScript on Node 22+.
- Styling: Plain CSS with design tokens (no framework).
- AI assistance: Claude Code for long-running tasks; Claude chat for drafting.
- Version control: Git, with GitHub as primary and Codeberg as a mirror.
Tools we ship
- Arabic Teleprompter: our own when we record Arabic pieces — RTL rendering done right, mirror mode, speed control.
- Tab Saver: installed in every browser profile we use — one-click snapshot of open tabs to a text file.
- Kids Corner: the test bed for how we teach Arabic letters and numbers to early readers.
- ASMSkills: the Claude Code skill pack we actually use — marketing, CRO, SEO, launch readiness — from the terminal.
Services we pay for
- Cloudflare: Pages for the site, Workers for the contact API, KV for rate limiting, Turnstile for form anti-abuse.
- GitHub: source of truth for code and CI.
- Codeberg: mirror.
- Stalwart: self-hosted mail server.
- MailChannels: transactional delivery from Workers.
- Umami: self-hosted analytics at
tracking.alsheikhmedia.com— no cookies, no IPs. - Hugging Face: for models and datasets we experiment with.
Books & influences
- Kathy Sierra — Badass: Making Users Awesome. The tone we aim for when we write about tools.
- Strunk & White — The Elements of Style. Every sentence earns its space.
- Naguib Mahfouz — the discipline and cadence of Arabic prose that doesn't announce itself.
- Ghassan Kanafani — reportage and fiction written on deadline, still holding up.
- Rebecca Solnit — essay structure.
- Edward Tufte — information design as moral argument.
- Derek Sivers — short, specific, direct writing on building companies.