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 list of some of my favorite stuff.

Workstation

  • 16” MacBook Pro, M1 Max

    I am an Apple fan and I simply love Mac. Sorry, no Windows.

  • Logitech MX Master 3 and MX Keys for Mac

    Logitech MX Master Series mouse and keyboard are simply the best, and they are my favorite go-to work companions. I credit them for super charging my productivitiy, and their ability to work with multiple sets of machines are pure incredible.

Productivity

  • CleanShot X

    CleanShot X is the best screenshot and screen recording app for Mac that I've used. It has various features like OCR, built-in annotation tool, Cloud uploading, scrolling capture, background tool, and a lot more.

  • Alfred 5

    I fell in love with Alfred ever since it's introduced to me by friends. It’s not the newest kid on the block but it’s still the fastest. The Sublime Text of the application launcher world.

  • Things

    Everyone has their own task management app, and Things is my favourite. I like its minimalist design, cute interaction animations, and amazing cross platform support.

  • Day One

    I journal daily, and this app has the records of all my random thoughts and memories throughout the years.

  • Finance by Matthias Hochgatterer

    A doubule-entry finance journaling app by developer Matthias Hochgatterer. You cannot even find it easily on Apple Store, but I think it's better than all other finance apps out there. It's simple and straight-to-the-point. I have the habbit of logging and categorizing every single financial transaction I've made for decades now, and this is the app I've stick with all this time.

Developer Tools

  • Sublime Text

    I don’t care if it’s missing all of the fancy IDE features everyone else relies on, Sublime Text is still the best text editor ever made.

  • Visual Studio Code

    This one needs no introduction. The king of IDE for writing code.

  • iTerm2

    I’m honestly not even sure what features I get with this that aren’t just part of the macOS Terminal but it’s what I use. Maybe I just like the better color theme in iTerm2.

  • Bun

    Bun is the new popular kid on the street. It's a fast JavaScript runtime, bundler, test runner, and package manager all in one. I really would like to see this take off and make npm and yarn the history.

Framework

  • React

    Amongst all the web framework I learned, React is my favorite. After the introduction of React hooks, I fell deeply in love with it. I prefer React over all other frameworks I learned and used over the years, including but not limited to Django, Flask, Ruby on Rails, AngularJS. My favoirte React framework is NextJS.

  • Tailwind CSS

    Let's say that I hated CSS until I learned Tailwind CSS. It's simple, beautiful, flexible, and intuitive. Sure it makes the website HTML full of CSS-like classes, but they make UI so much easier to customize and debug.

  • Headless UI

    Headless UI is another gem brought to life by Tailwind Labs. Its completely unstyled, fully accessible UI components integrate beautifully with Tailwind CSS.

  • Framer Motion

    Framer Motion really makes animation simple yet powerful. It integrates beautifully with React. What more can I say. If you never used it, go check it out.

  • SwiftUI

    SwiftUI makes iOS development incredibly easy, and really showcases why iOS is a much better phone operating system over Android as a result of its opinionated developer API inspired by Apple's unique and successful user interface patterns.