This is a list of all the things that I use to be productive day-to-day. It’s inspired by this page.
Website: Corsair K70 Lux
I bought this keyboard back in 2013, and it’s been my daily workhorse ever since. I use it for gaming, coding, and writing. The cats don’t mind the loudness of the Cherry Red switches.
Website: Viotek GN34C
Though some games don’t support 3440x1440 resolution, I’ve found this to be excellent for coding and for graphics editing capabilities. Also, watching movies on this thing is awesome.
Website: DXRacer King Zero
After many years of living with a barely-intact office chair I bought for $5 at Goodwill, I bought a DXRacer King Zero gaming chair. It was a night and day experience. So comfortable! Mine is sunburst yellow and black.
Website: Firefox
This is my web browser of choice. While sometimes I’m forced to use Brave, I try to avoid anything Chromium-based if I can help it.
Website: Affinity Photo
My replacement for Photoshop. It’s pretty good, and while my Photoshop muscle memory doesn’t translate perfectly, its buy-once model combined with its feature set makes it the better alternative.
Website: Affinity Designer
Same story as Photo, but this one replaces Adobe Illustrator. The one difference is that I reach for Inkscape when I need to trace raster graphics.
Website: Affinity Publisher
Same story as Photo, but this one replaces Adobe InDesign. It’s still new enough to have some issues and there are features missing, but it works well enough for laying out books and such.
Website: Sublime Text
Up until recently, I used VS Code for anything that didn’t need a dedicated IDE, but was a little too
heavy for just vim. However, after getting fed up with some annoying Electron issues, I decided to
try Sublime Text again. It had been about half a decade since I last tried it out, but oh man, is it
fast. I’ve now uninstalled VS Code everywhere and use this instead.
Website: Jetbrains GoLand
I write a lot of Go. And by far the best tool for writing Go has been GoLand.
Website: Namecheap
I’ve heard that other domain registrars are better (e.g., Hover), but I host almost all of my domains at Namecheap because it works well enough.
Website: Digital Ocean
Digital Ocean is the infrastructure provider I use for all of my personal projects. It’s cheaper than AWS, Azure, or GCP, the tooling is really good, and the community is fantastic.
Website: Netlify
Netlify hosts this website, and a handful of other static sites. It’s free and works really well.