Essentials I Use (almost) Daily
Development workflows are changing faster than ever and it seems like every other week there's a new tool or skill that'll make you a more productive engineer. I'm sure I will have to update this list soon because of the release of a transcendant tool.
A big part of being an engineer is choosing your tools: what you use, when you use it, and which ones you actually enjoy using. Depending on the context of the goal, some of those choices come down to personal preference and others may feel way closer to objective truth.
When you really dig into it, engineers do hold strong opinions about their development environment, best workflow practices, or their favorite technologies, even if they don't realize it. Here are mine, ranging from engineering to everyday life.
I daily drive a MacBook Pro (M4 Pro 24GB) for work or any side programming work, that still runs macOS Sequoia (I'm holding out on upgrading to Tahoe and it's liquid glass as long as safely possible). As a former Arch Linux user, btw, I understand and even agree with some of the popular quarrels with developing on mac.
In my humble opinion, the pros heavily outweigh the cons. When it comes to hardware, Apple has some of and if not the best out to offer. That's what matters most for me.
My homelab is currently running Fedora and it's been great. If you're not yet homelabbing, I highly recommend you look into it. I use Immich and Nextcloud for self-hosted cloud storage, Ollama and LM Studio for local models, and Jellyfin for my glorious media server. If you already have one, check out Tailscale as well.
I've spent a lot of time focusing on reducing friction in my development environment. Command tab'ing through windows or waiting for slow apps to load has no room in my workflow. I love Ghostty because it feels instantaneous.
If you're a professional developer logging multiple hours a day in a terminal, you deserve to use a tool that reduces micro-latency and will decrease brain friction. Ghostty is fast, native, and feature rich.
I enjoy the raw speed of GPU acceleration while also having the native feel of a high quality macOS or Linux application. I have tried to optimize my development environment for the best possible feedback loop, and Ghostty furthers that goal. It's also the perfect home for my Neovim setup.
I don't have any quarrels with Bash. I'm actually a fan of its' creator Brian Fox. But, for the past three years or so I've been using Zsh (pronounced zee-ess-eight-ch, argue with the wall) , and never looked back. I have heard great things about the Fish shell, so maybe I'll try it and it'll become the next shell I shill.
Zsh's enhanced autocomplete, vast plugin ecosystem thanks to Oh-My-Zsh, and improved history are just no-brainers for me. Feel free to checkout my .zshrc file that has all of my custom aliases, which are designed to eliminate excessive keystrokes and spare my future wrists. There are also some fun touches, like Interstellar quotes that greet you on every new terminal window.
Tmux is already great. Oh-my-tmux makes me love it even more. It has a nice out of the box polished look and powerline styled prompt, with a great default config. Once you start using tmux, the idea of having to manually re-open your project tabs every session becomes unthinkable.
Yes, I paid $75 for a font. It was worth every single penny. It's a beautifully crafted typeface, one that I enjoy looking at for long periods of time.
Great readability, renders well everywhere, and it evokes the warm and fuzzy feeling of interacting with vintage technologies that I just can't get enough of.
I mean, just look at it:
I've tried many many browsers throughout the years. Chrome, Firefox, Vivaldi, Horse, Edge, Brave, Zen, Arc, Safari, Opera, and regretfully Internet Explorer. Each of them has their own set of pros and cons, like Chrome blocking UBlock Origin or Firefox's inability to render gradients correctly.
Helium has been by far my favorite browser. It checks all my boxes:
- vertical tabs
- split view
- good ad-blocking
- natively handles bangs
- minimal layouts for maximal screen real estate usage
- chromium based
It's essentially a way better Google Chrome experience and it's open source. Everyone I've recommended Helium to has loved it, so if you haven't tried it yet, don't delay start today!
Like I said earlier, I try to eliminate as much friction from my workflow as possible. Raycast plays a big role in that and I guarantee that once you try Raycast, you'll never use Spotlight ever again.
It's faster, more tailored for powerusers, and can also just get out of the way and work. There are a ton of built-in tools and functionalities I love, like their color picker implementation, screenshot text searching, or just the idea that prompting GPT is just one ⌘ + Space away at all times. Combined with the other hundreds of extensions out there, I'm sure there's even more value I haven't even gotten to yet.
The custom keybinds changed my entire workflow. At all times, I can access my terminal with Shift + ⌘ + 1, browser with Shift + ⌘ + 2, and IDE with Shift + ⌘ + 3. No more ⌘+Tab'ing to cycle between the many applications I may have open at any given time.
Codex, Cursor, Claude Code, OpenCode, T3 Code
I couldn't just mention one, there's too much value out there. Codex, Cursor, Claude Code, OpenCode, T3 Code, OpenRouter, Pi... each has its strengths. I love Cursor's harness, Fable 5.1 is genuinely amazing, and OpenCode is refreshingly cheap.
I also couldn't dare to name just one model or AI lab. For all I know, the next best model could drop tomorrow and render this post obsolete. My best piece of advice is to go out there and try new things. I've recently done some work with Muse Spark 1.3 and it's speed is incredible. GPT 6 Astra's computer use is something I imagined as a kid. Don't lock yourself into being an engineer who's reluctant to use tools or models outside of their current scope.
There are a ton of skills out there that provide a huge amount value, in terms of the actual production of software or even just for the developer experience all around. Since there are so many, I'll just run off a list of some of my favorites.
pstack
This stack was created by poteto (https://x.com/poteto), an engineer who's worked with millions of lines of code at Meta, Netflix, and Cursor. Pstack is what they use on a daily basis in order to write less code, but higher quality code. It's model agnostic and was actually designed with multi-model workflows in mind, to take advantage of each model's unique strengths.
Unslop
This is one of my favorite skills from pstack. Unslop cuts any AI tells from writing, by scanning for patterns and rewriting with preserved meaning and intended tone. It's a must.
ASD-STE100
If you're not familiar with ASD-STE100 (Simplified Technical English), it's an international standard and controlled natural language used to write clear, precise, and unambiguous technical documentation, with strict instructions on grammar, sentence length, active voice, and style. It limits sentences to being shorter, to only contain a single instruction, and forbids vague phrasing. It's essentially a structural guardrail.
English is full of idioms, nuance, and double meanings, which makes it hard for agents to be consistent. Using or processing STE changes the game for your agents. It eliminates vague logic, minimizes hallucinations, and reduces token usage and costs. This skill particularly shines when an LLM agent is parsing another agent's output. When I have Codex making PRs, I want consistent communication with services like CodeRabbit or Greptile.
Prototype
Prototype makes your agents build several genuinely different versions of a UI piece and gives you the ability to flip through them live behind a visual picker to pick a winner. We're still not at the point where LLMs don't create slop, so one of the biggest got-ya's when using AI during development still remain. The lack of intention. This and many of Emil's other skills, forces the engineer to still have intention when developing UI.
I could go on and on and on, check out the running list I'm keeping at https://github.com/jordansmalls/skills and keep an eye out for the skill I'm launching soon.
I've fiddled with essentially every note taking app or system out there. Most of them you spend more time configuring a system that feels productive than it actually is. This meme sums it up pretty well:
I've learned that the best solution is whichever one satisfies these two conditions:
- low friction for use
- you'll actually use it
You'll notice that both of those conditions are essentially the same thing. That's the point. I'd bet that 9/10 people would be perfectly fine using Apple Notes. Don't overcomplicate this or try to "productivity-maxx", it'' just end up being more work than it's worth. Notion solves email, notes, todo lists, calendars and it is essentially my second brain.
I've been using Notion fairly consistently since 2017. But like I mentioned before, I have dabbled with the Obsidians, Google Keeps, and Microsoft OneNote's of the world, so there were a few stints I went without it. I plan on sticking with Notion for the foreseeable future, as it's become quite clear that devs are going to be switching from model to model, and I believe that having a connector for context that every tool can utilize definitely seems like the move.
Humans are notoriously bad at creating (and remembering) truly random strings of characters. That being said, password managers are the single most important tool the average person can use to secure their digital life.
Following good OPSEC practices, I won't say which one I particularly use, but everyone should definitely be using one. Whether it's Bitwarden, 1Password, Proton Pass or even Apple Passwords, let the tools create and manage better passwords for you. If you're not using passkeys, start, it'll make your life easier. If you're like me and want your passwords to be essentially completely unbreakable, check out what's next.
You should also be using two-factor authentication as well.
Most password generators aim for good enough. This one doesn't. Following a philosophy of security through over-engineering, I built this password generator to be extraordinarily safe, even in a world of quantum computers.
Every password generated is 48 characters long, containing both uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols, totaling 9448 possible combinations. That's fifty-one trigintillion, three hundred and two novemvigintillion possible passwords.
These passwords have ~314 bits of entropy, which is considered completely resistant to brute force attacks by any classical computer, now or in the foreseeable future. The time required to crack it would be measure in a number of years that is practically infinite. Even if we turned every atom in the universe into a supercomputer, it would take billions of years to guess it.
This tool was designed to be used in tandem with password managers, and prioritizes maximum security over convenience, so always use a password manager with this tool. If you're familiar with Node.js, I built a tiny terminal utility to generate these passwords quickly and completely independent of any outside communication.
It seriously works. Whenever I need to get in the zone and get some deep work done, I reach for Brain. Here's a 30 minute focus track, similar to what I use for time-box sessions.
Serato has only lost it's "industry standard" tag because of the massive popularity and dominance of Pioneer hardware. It's still superior software, being the leader in audio fidelity and vocal isolation. It's also much more flexible, making it the go-to choice for open-format DJs.
I've used variations of Serato software for 10+ years, starting with Scratch Live and Itch, to now Serato DJ Pro. If you are serious about DJing, use Serato. You're welcome.