Software I use, tools 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
13” MacBook Pro, M2, 8GB RAM (2022)
Repeat with me, "I do not need a fancy setup". I was using a home workstation prior to this but found that I love programming on the go. My Laptop allows me to stay modular and utilize my time to the fullest.
Language
Typescript
My go to programming language for my full stack workflow. Typescript is a superscript of javascript that makes my development process a lot easier. I tend to catch bugs quicker before compiling my code and write cleaner and more consice code because of it.
Frontend
Next.js, (App Router)
A Framework built on the React component library. My main considerations are: lazy loading, image optomization/caching, simple routing, serverside operations, my love with [.jsx, .tsx, .mdx], and amazing docs.
Vercel
It should come to no surprise that I deploy my frontend code on Vercel. The Next.js framwork was built to work with Vercel directly and allows for a simple hosting solution.
Tailwind CSS
I have tried plenty of CSS languages but I am currently sticking with Tailwind CSS since it is a lightweight inline solution and becuase by using it I have learned CSS without the guard rails of a built in component library.
Backend
Express.js
A Framework built on top of Node.js. My main consideration is that it is typescript compatible and it is the default standard so its very simple to get started with a quick look at the docs.
Heroku
A hosting solution that uses AWS in the background. It is perfectly suited for hosting server side code and has always just worked!
MongoDB
A document based database that has a lot of strong documentation for my tech stack.
Development tools
Zed
I love the out of the box functionalities, while its not the most popular IDE I do not think I will ever go back to Visual Studio Code.
Clerk
A god send for setting up authentication quickly with good docs and great compatiblity with my tech stack.
Stripe
In my opinion the best payment processing service on the market. Stripe is an invaluable tool that every full stack developer should learn. They have amazing customer support.
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
A very broad and complex service that has many usecases from file storage, hosting, email management, domain resgistars, and etc.
Postman
I am not a huge fan of writing unit tests so my go to for testing has been Postman. Simple and easy with all the features I need for testing my server side code.
MongoDB Compass
Great software for working with MongoDB databases. Has streamlined the process of bootstraping my server side code.
Git
A must have for version control, the defacto standard by a far margin.
Docker
Especially when working with Amazon Web Services, docker is an amazing technology that allows all my dev enviornments to match my production enviornments.
Design
Figma
I am not a graphic designer by any means but this is a fairly simple software that has helped kickstart my frontend creativity. I hear it works well with teams!
Tailwind UI
It does have a hefty cost but I can admit there is a ton of components to use from marketing, apps, and e-commerce. I really like the templetes as well since they show complete finished code that uses strong coding standards with my frontend framework of choice, Next.js.
Productivity
Notion
While I am still new to Notion I love the endless usecases for this software. From blogs, to journals, to task tracking, and automation. Notion has it all!
Eraser.io
A great tool for collaborative project planning complete with diagrams and advance markdown. They recently added some cool ai tools that are very helpful.