/uses Page

Nice find! 🙌 /uses is a nice sort of personal-website standard where people post stuff they use to do their work or just in their life. I swear it is, but I can't find a link about this anywhere now.

Hardware

  • I use a 2021 14-inch M1 Pro MacBook Pro. Love it.
  • I have an iPad Air that I use to draw slides (with the Apple Pencil) and watch movies, and sometimes do some shopping.
  • My phone is an iPhone 15 Pro Max. I don't really care about which computer or iPad I use, but I'm a sucker for phones and I love the iPhone.

Software

I'm a software engineer, so I use computers and software a lot, but who doesn't these days anyway.

Computerz

I use macOS as my main OS.

macOS Apps

  • VS Code as my main text editor.
  • iTerm 2 as my terminal.
  • 1Password for password management. I pay for a family subscription, and I think 1Password might be my favorite piece of software ever?
  • Dash for consulting documentation. It's an app that aggregates documentation from different software, programming languages, and ecosystems (it supports hex.pm packages!!). It lets you search though everything. Just awesome.
  • Obsidian for taking notes.
  • Mail.app (the default) for email.
  • Fantastical for calendars. I pay for a subscription for this and love it.
  • Keynote.app for giving talks.
  • TablePlus for talking to databases.
  • Raycast to do a lot of stuff. I launch apps with it, run little scripts that I wrote as extensions, use it for clipboard management, for snippets, as a calculator, and probably more. I used to use Alfred for this but nowadays Raycast has a bunch more extensions.

I also use a lot of little utilities here and there to make life on macOS more pleasant.

  • I use Magnet to move my windows around.
  • AltTab lets me command-tab my way around much better than the default.
  • CleanShot X to take screenshots. I'm a nerd for screenshots.
  • Klack (and this is silly) for having mechanical-keyboard sound in my headphones when I type on my normal Apple keyboard—which I prefer for the actual typing.
  • Hand Mirror to check that I'm pretty before meetings.
  • Timing to track what I do when looking at screens. This is cool because I'm a nerd for data about what I do, but also a bane because it shows me how much time I just screw around.

iOS/macOS/iPadOS Apps

There are a bunch of apps I use cross-device and outside of doing software development.

  • HiCoffee for tracking caffeine intake. I'm a data nerd, again.
  • Pocket Casts for listening to podcasts.
  • Reminders.app (the default Apple one) for reminders and grocery shopping and house-cleaning chores. I share some lists with my wife.
  • My wife and I have a YNAB subscription. YNAB is awesome.
  • I use Mela for storing and archiving recipes. I like to cook. I used to use Paprika, but Mela is prettier and seems to be more actively maintained.
  • Whering is pretty great for tracking your wardrobe, how much you use it, and so on.

Traveling

My biggest passion in life is probably traveling. I like to optimize the things I can when traveling, so this is my favorite section in this page.

Software

  • Even though I hate it and it's a battery hog, I use Google Maps really all the time. It's the only place where I trust transportation, reviews, and opening times in most places around the world. I don't use it for directions much because I rarely drive when traveling. Apple Maps is nicer and doesn't drain battery, but here in Italy it's pretty much useless. Also, Google Maps recently (and finally) added support for custom icons and emojis for custom lists, so now this is also a good database of visited places for me—and restaurants, pubs, whatever.

  • TripIt is the place where I store all the info about the trips I do. Plane tickets, hotels, train tickets, parking, restaurant reservations, whatever. Also super handy because I can share trips with my wife, both as a viewer and as a traveler, so that she has access to everything too.

  • I use Flighty.app to manage my flights. It's the stupidest sixty bucks (you read correctly) I spend out of every single cent that goes out of my bank account, but man do I love this app.

  • When I travel with friends, I love to use Splid to track expenses. It makes it so easy to just pay for stuff and then figure it out later.

  • I mostly use TikTok (yep, TikTok) for finding out places to visit, restaurants, and whatnot. I also Google around, sure, but TikTok has a lot of interesting content when it comes to travel.

  • I recently discovered Airalo for buying travel eSIMs. My life is changed forever.