Software I love and things I recommend 🫶

I get asked a lot about the things I use to build software or stay productive. Here’s a big list of all of my favorites.

Workstation

  • 16” MacBook Pro, M1 Max, 64GB RAM (2021)

    I was using an Intel-based 13” MacBook Air before this and the difference is night and day. I’ve never heard the fans turn on a single time, even under the incredibly heavy loads I put it through during various product launches.

  • Starlink Receiver (portable)

    When living out in the countryside on a farming island, simple phone-calls are a trial - forget about hosting zoom calls, downloading software bundles and rapid testing/iteration. Starlink is a life-saver to break free from poor local telecommunications infrastructure, both at home and when on the road.

Productivity

  • GPT-4

    The newest kid on the block in terms of worker productivity. GPT-4 and ChatGPT are my partners in crime when it comes to programming and research assignments. For delicate assignments where data integrity is vital, I power ChatGPT with custom vector embeddings, to overcome its hallucination problems.

  • Calendly

    Great tool for scheduling meetings while protecting my calendar and making sure I still have lots of time for deep work during the week.

Design

  • Midjourney

    Since the release of V5, Midjourney has pulled away from Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2. I use Midjourney for design inspiration in the form of Web UI and layout, which I then bring over to GPT-4 to build as TailwindCSS components.

  • Dipickt

    All in one AI image creation and editting. Faster and more consistent than the disparate tools spread across the internet - I always find myself coming back to this tool.

  • Canva

    A tool considered by many designers to be almost as heretical as AI Generation tools, but for a quick design edit for a very reasonable price, the Canva suite often has exactly what you need. Ditto for on the fly animations.

Marketing

  • HypeFury

    Twitter as a growth engine has been a power-house for close to a decade, with the #buildinpublic movement as a key driver for the budding indie software scene. Scheduling and engagement tools like HypeFury greatly help to drive engagement and traffic towards products and help greatly with product launches.

Sales

  • Waalaxy

    LinkedIn and Email automation outreach tool, that opens up the world of high-ticket business in an unprecedented way. Excellent for both User Research and Sales campaigns.