Software I use, gadgets I love, and other things I recommend.

I get asked a lot about the things I use to build software, stay productive, or buy to fool myself into thinking I’m being productive when I’m really just procrastinating. Here’s a big list of all of my favorite stuff.

Workstation

  • 15.6” HP Laptop, AMD Ryzen 5500U Hexa-Core, 8GB RAM (2022)

    Just a regular laptop with no additional displays. Colors are no good at all on this screen, but overall it has been a really good laptop for web development.

Development tools

  • VS Code

    Visual Studio Code is a code editor redefined and optimized for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications. I tried switching to Neovim in the past but I always came back to VSCode.

  • Theme: Catppuccin Mocha

    Soothing pastel theme for VSCode/VSCodium.

  • Font: Fira Mono

    Designed by Carrois Apostrophe to integrate with the character of the FirefoxOS, the Fira typefaces also aim to cover the legibility needs for a large range of handsets varying in screen quality and rendering.

  • Responsively App

    A free and open source dev-tool that helps with faster and precise responsive web development. It is a modified web browser that provides an instant preview of all target screens in a single window side-by-side, allowing developers to develop responsive web apps 5x faster.

  • Windows Terminal

    A modern host application for command-line shells like Command Prompt, PowerShell, and bash (via Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)). Its main features include multiple tabs, panes, Unicode and UTF-8 character support, a GPU accelerated text rendering engine, and the ability to create your own themes and customize text, colors, backgrounds, and shortcuts.

  • Windows Subsystem for Linux

    Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) lets developers run a GNU/Linux environment — including most command-line tools, utilities, and applications — directly on Windows, unmodified, without the overhead of a traditional virtual machine or dual-boot setup.

  • Git

    Almost every developer uses it. Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

  • pnpm

    A fast, disk space efficient package manager. pnpm is up to 2x faster than the alternatives because files inside node_modules are cloned or hard linked from a single content-addressable storage.

Design

  • Figma

    A collaborative web application for interface design, with additional offline features enabled by desktop applications for macOS and Windows. The feature set of Figma focuses on UI and UX design, with an emphasis on real-time collaboration.

Productivity

  • Microsoft PowerToys

    A set of utilities for power users to tune and streamline their Windows experience for greater productivity. The ones I find myself using the more are: Color Picker, PowerRename, and TextExtractor.

  • Obsidian

    A private and flexible note‑taking app that adapts to the way you think. Obsidian stores notes on your device, so you can access them quickly (and no one else can read them), even offline. With hundreds of plugins and their open API, it’s easy to tailor Obsidian to fit your personal workflow.

  • Cal.com

    An open event-juggling scheduler for everyone. Focus on meeting, not making meetings. Cal.com enables you to build processes around your events. Notifications, reminders and follow ups are automatically taken care of.

  • Super Productivity

    An advanced todo list app with integrated timeboxing and time tracking capabilities that helps to structure, organize and share your work. It also comes with integrations for Jira, Gitlab, GitHub and Open Project.

  • Linear

    It streamlines issues, sprints, and product roadmaps. Linear is the new standard for modern software development.

Chrome extensions

  • Bitwarden

    A freemium open source password management service that stores sensitive information such as website credentials in an encrypted vault.

  • uBlock Origin

    A CPU and memory-efficient, wide-spectrum, fast and lean content blocker for Chromium and Firefox. It blocks ads, trackers, coin miners, popups, annoying anti-blockers, malware sites, etc.

  • Axe

    Accessibility Checker for Developers, Testers, and Designers in Chrome. The free axe DevTools browser extension is a fast, lightweight, yet powerful testing tool driven by the world’s most trusted accessibility testing engine, axe-core, developed by Deque.

  • WAVE

    The WAVE Chrome, Firefox, and Edge extensions allows you to evaluate web content for accessibility issues directly within your browser.

  • Web Disability Simulator

    A Google Chrome extension that simulates how users with disabilities can experience a webpage. The simulator creates a experience that gives you a better understanding for the importance of web accessibility.

  • Visbug

    Open source web design debug tools built with JavaScript: a FireBug for designers. Point, click, move, resize & tinker. Edit or style any page, in any state, like it’s an artboard.

  • JSON Formatter

    An open source JSON formatter that makes JSON easy to read on the browser.

Miscellaneous

  • MuseScore 4

    A powerful, versatile, open source and free musical notation software (currently the world’s most popular notation app). With the release of MuseScore 4, it has received major improvements in the UI, layout, engraving, and playback features, making it a delight to use.

  • Anki

    A program which makes remembering things easy. Because it’s a lot more efficient than traditional study methods, you can either greatly decrease your time spent studying, or greatly increase the amount you learn.

  • OBS

    A free and open source software for video recording and live streaming. Stream to Twitch, YouTube and many other providers or record your own videos with high quality H264 / AAC encoding.

  • Darktable

    An open source photography workflow application and raw developer. A virtual lighttable and darkroom for photographers. It manages your digital negatives in a database, lets you view them through a zoomable lighttable and enables you to develop raw images and enhance them.

  • Kdenlive

    A powerful free and open source cross-platform video editing program made by the KDE community. Feature rich and production ready..

  • Discord

    The easiest way to talk over voice, video, and text. Talk, chat, hang out, and stay close with your friends and communities.

  • Telegram

    A cloud-based mobile and desktop messaging app with a focus on security and speed.