My Favorite Things

gifox

Super easy and quick screen recorder that lets you create and edit gifs. Your PR reviewers will love you. I paid $15 for a lifetime license. Amazing product.

CleanShot X

This is just a great screen recording tool. I loved Loom prior to its acquisition by Atlassian, and I've tried to love Cap.so. But I've landed on cleanshot as the best tool for reliably recording demos. You might not need both gifox and cleanshot, but I bought the gifox lifetime license before I found cleanshot ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

TablePlus

If you're a developer, you need a first-rate db client, and I actually picked up TablePlus after Kao at Coverbase recommended it. It's a lovely client, and I've tried a lot of them over the years.

MeetingBar

This app sits in your Mac OS menu bar and does 2 critical things:

1. Tells you when your next meeting is
2. Lets you join that meeting with 2 clicks

I support this app through Patreon. It's made in Ukraine. What more do you need to know?

RunJS

Just a nice standalone JavaScript repl. You can install packages. I find it real handy when I need to remember just how weird JavaScript is and want tight feedback loops.

Soft Skills Engineering by Jamison Dance and Dave Smith

This is one of my favorite podcasts; Dave and Jamison are fun to listen to and they often have great advice for navigating the non-technical aspects of building software

In Depth by First Round Review

they interview folks who have worked in various roles at successful startups, and the conversations are always illuminating. I've quoted them elsewhere on my blog!

The Joy of Why by Quanta Magazine

they explore really fascinating and difficult subjects, and Steven and Janna are both excellent interviewers. My favorite episodes include the ones on graph theory, dark matter, string theory (which I previously found utterly inaccessible), and knots.

Switchblade Sisters by April Wolfe

April is, IMO, the greatest podcast interviewer of all time. She is so prepared and knowledgeable, and she brings out the unique qualities and experience of each of her guests. Each episode is a very tight 45 minutes of insider baseball on the guest's favorite genre film — and the guest must be either an actor, writer, or director.

Let's Appreciate by Kyla Scanlon

Kyla writes poetry about the economy and coined the term "vibe-cession". Anything she publishes is going to be her best work and well-worthy of your time. It's the rare podcast where I have to listen at a playback rate less than 1.

Time in Indiana on Wikipedia

There's a perennial debate about eliminating daylight savings time, and I learned from deep, personal experience that timezones are so much more complicated and political than you think they are. This wikipedia page is an excellent companion to Zach Holman's blog post.

Anywhere on Earth on Wikipedia

There's a last place on Earth where any given day is still going — Howland and Baker Islands, out in the Pacific at UTC−12. "Anywhere on Earth" is the convention built on that: a deadline isn't blown until the date is gone everywhere, which lands at noon UTC the next day.

<> Motherfucking Website by @thebarrytone

The whole case for plain HTML, shouted, in 4.9 KB. It's a bit, but it's also just correct: semantic markup is responsive, accessible, and fast before you touch it, and everything you add after that is a choice you're making on someone else's behalf. Worth re-reading any time a framework starts to feel mandatory.

Ukiyo-e Heroes by Jed Henry and David Bull

Video game characters rendered as traditional Japanese woodblock prints — Jed Henry draws them, David Bull carves and prints them by hand in a Tokyo workshop. The process is the part I keep coming back to: the same technique used for ukiyo-e two centuries ago, aimed at Link and Mario, one hand-carved block per color. The shop only opens for a few days at a time, so subscribe now and thank me later.