😁 Ahoy, I’m Charlie Cooksey!

What do you do?

I’m a software engineer with over 20 years of professional experience. I’ve focused mostly on Ruby, Python, PHP, and Go with an emphasis on backend: ElasticSearch, GraphQL, Postgres & MySQL, Redis, Mongo, JSON APIs and their architecture. I practice test-driven development, behavior-driven development, and continuous integration. I’ve worked in a variety of industries, including cyber-security, education, and technology.

What hardware do you use?

My laptop is a Dell XPS 13” developer edition running Arch Linux on an Intel i7. My desktop PC is an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X running Arch Linux. My phone and tablet are Apple devices.

And what about software?

Arch Linux at home, macOS at work. I love open source. My favorite languages are Ruby and Python. Day to day, that looks like:

• Ghostty, Neovim, tmux and fish
• AI-assisted coding: Claude Code, OpenAI Codex and local open-weight models via LangGraph through custom ingestion pipelines
• herdr and lazygit
• Docker and containers
• Trunk-based development
• Dotfiles shared across Arch and macOS, managed with yadm
• Ruby, Rails & Sinatra + various gems
• PostgreSQL, MySQL and ElasticSearch

What is this site?

This is my blog. It’s a knowledge transfer and domain for both my resume and personal life updates. My hope is that you find this site useful. I typically write about software development alongside updates from my own life.

This site is built with:

• Jekyll (Ruby) and Sass
• Self-hosted Roboto and IBM Plex Mono fonts
• Docker Compose, which builds the site and runs everything else
• nginx, with HTTPS certificates from Let’s Encrypt via certbot