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.

Development Tools

Visual Studio Code

Visual Studio Code is still the best text editor ever made.

Tech Stack

React

The library for web and native user interfaces.

Next.js

Next.js is a framework on top of React. It is one of the most popular choices when building full-stack applications with React, because it comes with lots of features out of the box (e.g. routing, caching), several rendering strategies within the same application to optimize for different goals and all the recent features from React (e.g. Server Components and Server Functions) to connect your React application to the backend.

Tailwind CSS

I believe Tailwind is the best choice today for rapid product development and maintaining CSS in the long term. From my own experience, once you get the hang of Tailwind after a week, it's hard to imagine going back to traditional CSS approaches.

Shadcn UI

UI libraries come and go, but Shadcn UI has been trending for over a year now. It's a popular choice that works seamlessly with Tailwind CSS and offers a refreshing approach to UI management with its versionless system. I'd say it's a great choice for now, until the next big thing comes along or if everything starts to look too similar again.

Lucide Icons

Since this icon library already comes with Shadcn UI, I wouldn't see a need to replace it with something else. Once there is another popular kid on the block, I would consider switching for the next project.

TypeScript

I think there is not much say about this choice. TypeScript became the industry standard for JavaScript projects and it is a great choice to have a better developer experience, less bugs and more maintainable code.