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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.

Devices

  • Mac Studio & Mac Mini

    I get most of our work done here. It’s always switched on, stable and reliable.

  • iPad Pro and Apple pencil

    We carry our iPads everywhere. It’s where we log our raw ideas, get organised, and design our assets.

Operating Systems

  • MacOS

    MacOS delivers reliable performance for our Mac machines.

  • Ubuntu

    We use Ubuntu to run our Raspberry Pis. You’d be surprised how lightweight and incredibly well it can perform. It also has the largest community for Linux.

Infrastructure

  • Raspberry Pi

    We self-host a lot of our stuff and it’s the most cost efficient way to build a high performance system. It’s so modular that we can experiment with different hardware configurations.

  • Digital Ocean

    It's a straightforward and cost-effective cloud provider.

  • Namecheap

    This is honest marketing. They truly make it cheap for anyone to own a domain, and even provide a domain name privacy guard for free.

Tools

  • NGINX

    NGINX is a widely used, so much so that it is the current industry standard for web servers.

  • Kubernetes

    We use Kubernetes to orchestrate all our deployments. We are completely obsessed by it.

  • Docker

    Containers are awesome. We can share and run our code anywhere.

  • Jenkins

    We use Jenkins to automate a lot of our work including CI/CD.

  • GitLab

    We use gitlab for our private projects.

Productivity

  • Notion

    It’s truly an all-in-one workspace. We use Notion for our team wiki, Agile sprints, project management and product documentation.

  • Miro

    Miro is great for running ideation sessions in a big team. Thanks to their templates, we spend less time preparing, and more time thinking.

  • Concepts

    We use Concepts on our iPads to sketch and experiment with different system/ data architectures. It’s easy to iterate ideas on our own before discussing together.

Design

  • Affinity Designer

    We like the fact that Affinity Designer is a one-off purchase, for a tool we use sporadically for our assets. In fact, we bought both the Mac and iPad versions for that added convenience.

  • Blush

    Let’s be real, not all of us are artists. That’s why we love Blush.

  • Excalidraw

    We appreciate how simple this mockup tool is. We use Excalidraw for most of our lo-fi wireframes and engineering diagrams.

  • Figma

    Figma is where we do all our design heavy-lifting. It’s where we develop our hi-fi wireframes, prototypes, and collaborate with each other.

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