Aug 12, 2025
My MacOS setup in 2025
A brief overview of the apps I have installed and find useful on my MacBook and the configurations I have made to fit my use cases.
Kainoa Ho
Penultimate Software Engineering Student @ SMU
I’m a software engineer interested in building memory safe apps in Rust, and portable declarative environments with Nix.
I manage my entire digital life from my macOS workstation to my Linux desktop entirely through Nix.
Whether it’s fumbling with Nix Flakes, riceing tiling window managers, or tuning Neovim.
I’m happiest when I’m tweaking configs or building custom tooling to optimise my developer experience, often at the expense of real productivity.
When I’m not refining my configs or writing random tools,
I’m usually tinkering with my old gaming PC Home-Lab that’s currently serving this very site you're on!
(well... unless Cloudflare's cache beat me to it. I'd say it's 50/50 odds).
Checkout my projects below to see how i translate my obsessions into real products!!
Work Experience
Dec '25 - Now
Dec '25 - Now
Home Team Science & Technology Agency
Q-Team Internship, AI/LLM R&D Deployment
- Architected and deployed secure Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) infrastructure with Helm charts
- Prototyped and deployed RAG enhancements: metadata tagging, hybrid retrieval, and agentic routing
- Optimised apps, maximising liveness and concurrency, improving fault tolerance and graceful degradation
- Deployed Elastic Agent sidecars via Helm and configured Kibana dashboards
Mar - Jun '21
Mar - Jun '21
Lifeway Singapore Pte Ltd
Contract Software Engineer
- Migrated exising processes to a new CRM service
- Implemented custom integrations for the CRM with other exisiting services
- Built custom procurement system, integrated with the CRM enabling seamless handoff between sales and procurement teams
Education
2023 - Now
2023 - Now
Singapore Management University
Bachelor of Science in Software Engineering
- SCIS Achievements Scholarship
- Archery Club Captain & Vice-Captain
- Teaching Assistant for Operating Systems & Networking
- Teaching Assistant for Web Application Development II
2018 - 2021
2018 - 2021
Nanyang Polytechnic
Diploma in Infocomm & Security with Merit
- Archery Club President & Vice-President
- Sports Club Head of Logistics
Projects
A selection of my recent work across web development, mobile apps, open source, and design.
Cross Platform Nov 2025
Chrio
Cross Platform application built in Rust with Tauri for clinians to track and compare images of patiends for physiotherapy.
MacOS Demo Nov 2024
Aerospace-Sketchybar Config
Simple example config for setting up Aerospace and Sketchybar to work together.
CLI Tools Feb 2026
BucketFlow
CLI headless workflow orchastrator for git tracked, S3 synced, deterministic run execution.
Demo Nov 2025
Homelab
The configuration for my home lab services, managed with Docker Compose. Services are exposed to the internet via Traefik (public) or to my Tailscale network via tsdproxy. Hardened with docker socket proxy.
Demo Nov 2025
Dagster with Git-Sync
Demo K8s manifests for deploying Dagster with a gRPC code location with a git-sync sidecar for deploying dagster workflow code without an image build step.
MacOS CLI Tools Nov 2025
ncspot controller
Simple daemon and cli app to interface with ncspot's unix socket. Enabling custom hooks on song change and controlling playback from the shell. Written in Rust.
MacOS Tools Nov 2025
Kanata observer
Simple daemon to observe kanata layer changes via its unix socket. Allowing shell script hooks to be confiured for triggering custom integrations on layer changes.