This little exercise was inspired by Rafal Pastuzak who was inspired by Chris Coyer, who was inspired by Matt, who was inspired by Tracy Durnell and the HomeBrew Website Club.
Talking about what tools and software you use is something that has become more popular on the indie web. I think it'll be fun to make another list like this in 5 years or so.
Defaults
đ¨ Mail Client: Outlook
đŽ Mail Server: Outlook
đ Notes: Obsidian for long-form notes, Google Keep for quick notes
â To-Do: Google Keep. Simple and easy to share with my partner.
đˇ Photo Shooting: iPhone 17
đ¨ Photo Editing: Affinity
đ§ Audio Editing: N/A
đī¸ UX (wireframing, prototyping): Figma
đš Video Editing: Davinci Resolve, free version
đŽ Game engine: N/A
âđŧ Journaling: Obsidian and a phsyical notebook
đ§đŊ Meditation: Insight Timer, sometimes a guided meditation on Youtube, or nothing at all
đ¨ Drawing: Physical notebook
đ Calendar: Google Calendar
đ Cloud File Storage: A confusing mix of Antagonist, Microsfot OneDrive and iCloud
đ RSS: Don't have one yet!
đđģââī¸ Contacts: Google account
đ Browser: Firefox
đŦ Chat: WhatsApp
đ Bookmarks:
đ Read It Later: Goodreads
đ Word Processing: Obsidian for notes and drafts, Microsoft Word for formal documents
đ Spreadsheets: Microsoft Excel
đ Presentations:
đ Shopping Lists: Google Keep
đ´ Meal Planning: N/A
đ° Budgeting and Personal Finance: I used to be a BIG fan of YNAB, which is a form of envelope-based budgeting, but because of the pricing and how few of the features I need, I moved to Actual Budget. An open-source variant that does all the things I need. I track manually, and check my custom reports every month.
đ° News: N/A
đĩ Music: Spotify
đ¤ Podcasts: Spotify
đ Reading: Pocketbook Touch HD3
đ§âđģ Code Editor: IntelliJ IDEA
đĨī¸ Terminal: N/A
đšī¸ Games: N/A
Europe-based
I also want to look more into checking out which software I want to keep on using in the context of American vs Europe-based software that complies more with privacy and security measures. So this note is very much under construction and open for re-consideration.