Things I use to make my day better.
A growing collection of hardward and software I find myself using often, and/or with delight.
Workstation
14” MacBook Pro, M1 Max, 64GB RAM (2021)
Once I dipped my toes into M1-land I never looked back. This beast never fails to impress me.
32” Samsung 4K Space Monitor
I am working from a tiny desk at home, so space is an important factor when I’m looking at monitor. The clamp mechanism saves up precious footprint, and the screen is really nice.
Sonos One SL
The entry-level Sonos speaker makes for a great speaker on my desk, though I’m considering an upgrade to the Era 100 for the line input.
Elgato Wave:1
An essential buy at the beginning of the pandemic as work and community events now required folks to basically invest in a home studio.
Development tools
Visual Studio Code
As much as I yearn to use NeoVim as my regular code editor, I always end back up in the comfort of VS Code (in Vim mode). It’s snappy, feature-rich but not overly complex, and familiar. VS Code is my comfort-food for software editing.
iTerm2 & Tmux
iTerm2 is the first piece of software I install on a new computer. Reliable to the point I’m forgetting it’s a software I’m using all day, every day, and it never disappoint. I use Tmux and its keyboard shortcuts to manage windows and panes in the terminal—and tmuxinator to make starting my working days a matter of seconds.
TablePlus
My favorite database-related tool, by a long shot. It’s intuitive, beautifully made, and fast. A must if you find yourself poking at Postgres frequently.
Design
Figma & FigJam
While I started my (modest) UI/UX endeavors in Sketch, I find that the web-based Figma makes collaborating much easier. FigJam is my go-to tool for rapid prototyping, whiteboarding and diagramming.
Productivity
CleanShot X
The best screenshot and screen recording utility on macOS, bar none.
Tuple
Leagues ahead of Zoom and Google Meet when pair-programming. Intuitive yet powerful, and the video quality is no joke.
ScreenFlow
While I’m probably only using 10% of its capacities, ScreenFlow is a handy video editing tool I’m using to record presentations.
1Password
Few tools are as essential to my life as 1Password. Investing early in a good password manager was easily one of the best decisions I took long ago.