Uses
I've made a list of everything I use on a day to day basis to get work done!
Some of the links in this article are affiliate/referral links, meaning I'll get some kind of benefit from you clicking the link (& sometimes you will too).
At my desk
14" MacBook Pro, M1 Pro, 16GB Memory (2021)
I love this machine - it's a beast! It can pretty much do anything I need it to do. It wasn't cheap but it was well worth the upgrade from my 2019 MacBook Air.
I've never had an issue with anything made by LG. It does the job perfectly, just wish it was a tad larger.
My second mechanical keyboard! I have it in the White variant.
Before this I tried a couple of different mice (including the magic mouse) and I didn't like any of them. I bought this one after recommendations on Twitter & it works great!
I don't use the desk standing as much as I really should. It's a great desk though!
Development
I love using VS Code, definitely prefer it to other things I've tried in the past (like Sublime, PHPStorm, Atom). Part of the reason I love it so much is that it's really customisable.
I'm currently split between using Brave & Chrome. I have Brave on my personal laptop but I use Chrome on my work laptop as otherwise the 'Trello -> Harvest' workflow doesn't work (at least in my experience)
iTerm is a great alternative to macOS's default Terminal app.
When Tinkerwell expires at the end of the year, it's an instant re-buy! Makes it's money back straight away. I use it every day, multiple times a day.
At Steadfast, we use Tuple for pair programming and it's fantastic! It's also built by a bootstrapped company and I love it (I'm an AoP listener đ§)!
All of my projects are on GitHub and it's really great! In addition to using the website, I use GitHub Desktop, their Git GUI.
Gone are the
dump
s anddd
s -ray
is one of my favourite tools! You can easily dump something into the Ray desktop app without the app needing to stop loading the rest of the page.After Sequel Pro got crash-y a couple of years ago, I switched to TablePlus.
HELO is basically an alternative to Mailtrap - it's a desktop app, which you can direct test emails to.
Whenever I need to bring up a site on my phone, share a link with a co-worker or open up a webhook for Stripe, I use Expose.
If I need to do anything with designs or SVGs, I'll open up Sketch and make some tweaks. I've been using Sketch since I was in high school (thanks to their student discount) so I know how it works & how to do what I want quickly.
Other Software
I use 1Password as my password manager. I have vaults for Personal, Work, and shared vaults with family.
Things 3 is my personal task manager. I keep a bunch of reminders in there, along with tasks on 'projects' going on in my life (like making a new personal site đ ). It's the nicest, most well-designed desktop app out there!
I'm trying to take more notes of things to get 'stuff' out of my brain. Bear is where I store those notes - I can put notes in a hierarchical structure and add multiple 'tags' on a single note.
Whenever I browse Twitter, I do it with Tweetbot. It shows my timeline in 'latest first' order & without showing any adverts.
I use Fastmail for both my personal & business email inboxes. It works great, has a nice UI and is fairly priced.
I've used Fathom for years - it's a really good, privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics.
Business
Airtable holds information about all of my addon sales. Whenever a sale is 7 days old, it'll trigger an email to send via Postmark to the customer to ask for their feedback.
I don't know what I would do without FreeAgent. FreeAgent is my accounting software - I use it to keep on track of my business' finances, send invoices & submit my tax return. Can't highly recommend it enough! Oh, and they're based in Scotland đ´ó §ó ˘ó łó Łó ´ó ż