I’m going to give a sincere answer.

Usually AWS (or Vercel and Mongo Atlas if it’s a Node/MongoDB situation or an early dev situation). I forget all the brand names the other cloud providers use and have to do a search for “EC2 equivalent Azure” or whatever. You can’t be an expert in everything, after all. Plus, Azure has admin pages where I have to use Chromium instead of Firefox and it’s like, “Come on, assholes.” I don’t mind Google Cloud but it’s rarely cheaper and I can’t justify it to someone paying me.

I know Amazon is evil. I cancelled my Washington Post subscription — I lived in DC so I kept it longer than most would — because Jeff Bezos is a fucking menace. But you kind of have to pick one or keep a chart on your desk with all the different brand names and what equals what.

Just use open source. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. I’m a full stack developer and I’ve never given Microsoft a dime.

Well, truth be told, my gaming PC came with Windows and I did buy Flight Simulator but I felt dirty after and some of the silly airplane peripherals weren’t working right with Fedora so I kept it dual boot. That was before Steam Deck and Proton, though, so I should probably test it all again.

You can get lithium from the pharmacy if you act crazy enough. Farm fresh lithium too, not some old phone battery lithium.