The tools I actually use — and what I think of each.
Not a roundup, not affiliate links — just an honest, opinionated log of what's in my kit right now, how I lean on each one, and where each one bites. This list grows as my ecosystem gets more complex, so consider it a snapshot, not a final answer.
Last updated Jul 2026.
Daily driver
The center of everything. I use it to pull a thesis out of messy notes, draft and re-draft, pressure-test arguments, and rubber-duck decisions. The trick is treating it like a sharp colleague who needs context, not a vending machine — I paste in a lot, then push back hard on the first answer.
How this site exists. I describe what I want in plain English and iterate. It changed what counts as 'too technical to bother' — small tools and one-off scripts are now a 20-minute ask instead of a project I'll never start.
Where half-formed ideas live before they're workflows. Every guide here started as a Notion page. I keep it deliberately loose — over-structuring a notes app is a way of doing fake work instead of real thinking.
Where the look of things gets figured out. I brief it with a thesis and real copy, then iterate by talking — 'more restrained,' 'make this feel like a story, not a resume.' It got this whole site from idea to something I'd actually show people, without me opening a design tool.
In rotation
The shoebox. Resumes, transcripts, old essays, exports — the raw material I feed into Claude. Not glamorous, but a workflow is only as good as what you point it at, and Drive is where 'what you point it at' lives.
The thing I'm always trying to spend less time in. Most of my inbox workflows are about getting out of here faster — draft, decide, archive. I let AI rank and draft; I never let it auto-send.
Free hosting and a safety net. GitHub Pages serves this site for $0, and the commit history means I can experiment without fear of breaking something permanently. The naming convention is fiddly once, then invisible forever.
The inbox for everything that isn't email. I dump tasks the second they appear and sort later — capture first, organize never-quite-perfectly. It's the spine of my weekly personal review, and the one productivity app I've actually stuck with.
The backend behind this site — a real Postgres database plus auth, without me ever standing up a server. It holds the reactions, comments, and my coaching leads, and it runs the admin login. The part that made me slow down was row-level security: getting the 'server-only' rules right is ten extra minutes that's absolutely worth it.
Where this site lives. I push to GitHub and it deploys itself — that loop is what makes 'just ship it' actually true. The gotchas were mine, not its: environment variables only take effect on a fresh build, and edge functions have a size limit I found the hard way.
Handles every email the site sends — the newsletter, the coaching notifications, and the admin login codes. Setup was mostly DNS to verify my domain; after that it just works. Routing the auth emails through it also killed the rate limits I kept hitting.
Trialing
My go-to when a project outgrows plain GitHub Pages — drag-and-drop deploys and instant preview links are genuinely nice. Still deciding whether it earns a permanent spot or stays the thing I reach for on bigger one-offs.
This list keeps growing.
As I fold new tools into how I work, they land here first — usually as a "Trialing" note before I trust them. Want to know the moment the stack changes?