Here are some tools and services I love. Maybe you’ll love them too.
I won’t waste your time talking about the common ones like Twitter, Evernote or Slack.
Pocket is my device-agnostic read-later list. My bookmarking tool. It has native apps for OSX and iOS, integrates wonderfully with Twitter (bookmarks the link and the tweet containing the link), supports clean reading view and (perhaps best of all) supports offline mode. I can catch up on my bookmarked articles on flights! Nailed it.
Exist
I don’t go too crazy with self quantification. As someone with a desk job, I want to keep an eye on how active I am, so I can make sure I stay healthy. As someone who occasionally suffers from depression, I want to better understand how my habits affect my mood. Many self quantification tools just track fitness device’s steps or sleep. Exist tracks all that device data and more – tweets, songs listened to, local weather, and mood. And then it goes the extra mile and hits the gold: it identifies correlations that can help you understand the stats you’re collecting. The more data it has, the more confidently it can detect correlations. Pretty great, right?
Dreamhost
I first signed up for Dreamhost in 2006 as a cheap Ubuntu/Linux host, and have been so happy with them I’ve never looked back. Shared hosting of unlimited domains, unlimited MySQL databases, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited storage for under $10 a month? Sure thing. I love their free, one-click installs of a variety of tools like WordPress, Joomla, MediaWiki and Open Web Analytics (to name only a few). I love their witty and ridiculous yet informative monthly newsletters, their two factor authentication, auto-updates of WordPress, and their very powerful admin panel. Automatically set up to support reseller scenarios, and now with DreamObjects, their own S3- and Swift-compatible cloud storage solution, I really can’t speak highly enough of them. This blog is even running on Dreamhost! Check them out.
Trello
Kanban boards for everyone! With a quite-generous free tier, excellent onboarding and UX, and wide array of integrations and customisations, Trello is a bit of a no-brainer for teams and solo devs. I’ve used it to keep myself and my projects organised for a while and am super happy with it.
Harvest
I use Harvest for time tracking and invoicing of clients, and have for several years now. It’s solid, includes a client portal, has apps on most platforms, an excellent invoice-management system and integrates with plenty of services like Trello, Google Docs, Xero (for bookkeeping) and Stripe (so your clients can pay invoices online).
