Hey everyone 👋 — so I've been meaning to do this for a while, and today I finally decided to start a proper blog series. The idea is simple: every so often I'll share genuinely useful stuff — tools I've fallen in love with, little bits of tech news worth knowing, workflow tricks, and the occasional website that quietly makes my week easier. No fluff, no ten-year-old "top 100" listicles. Just the things I actually use.
And I figured there's no better way to kick things off than with the question people ask me most: "What's your daily tech stack?" So here it is — an honest tour of the apps and websites I open pretty much every single day.
1. My editor: VS Code
Let's start with the obvious one. VS Code is where I spend most of my hours. It's fast, endlessly extensible, and the extension ecosystem means it bends to whatever I'm working on that day — a quick script, a full web app, or just editing some stubborn config file. I keep my setup deliberately minimal: a good theme, a linter, and Git built right in. That's 90% of the job.
2. Design & quick mockups: Figma + Excalidraw
Before I write a line of code for anything visual, I sketch it. Figma is my go-to for anything that needs to look polished — real UI, sharable prototypes, handing designs off. But honestly, for the messy "let me just think out loud" phase, I reach for Excalidraw. That hand-drawn look somehow makes it easier to throw ideas away, which is exactly what you want early on.
3. Notes & planning: Notion
Every project starts as a Notion page. Ideas, to-do lists, half-formed thoughts, links I want to come back to — it all lands there first. I'm not precious about the setup; the value is having one place that's always open in a tab, ready to catch whatever's in my head before I forget it.
4. Naming new projects: ZeroTaken
This one fixes a problem that used to kill my momentum: naming things. You come up with the perfect name, get excited, go to register it… and the domain's been taken since 2009. These days I just run the idea through ZeroTaken — you describe what you're building and it suggests names, then shows you which domains are actually free. The bit I like is that it checks real availability, so I'm not getting attached to a name that turns out to be parked or premium-priced.
Naming is never the hard part of building something, but locking in a decent domain in five minutes instead of losing an afternoon is exactly the kind of friction I like to delete early.
5. Shipping it: GitHub + Vercel
Once there's actual code, GitHub handles version control and anywhere I collaborate, and Vercel gets it live. The push-to-deploy flow still feels a little bit like magic — commit, wait a few seconds, and there's a live URL. For quick front-end projects and prototypes it's hard to beat.
6. The little utilities that add up
Then there's the long tail of small tools I don't think about until I need them — and then I really need them. A launcher like Raycast for jumping around without touching the mouse. A color picker. A JSON formatter. And, naturally, a good set of document tools for the endless "can you just convert this real quick" moments — which, not so subtly, is exactly why we built PDFbox. Need to merge a few PDFs, shrink one down to email it, or turn a pile of images into a single PDF? That's the boring-but-essential corner of my stack, and it saves me constantly.
Wrapping up
That's the core of it — editor, design, notes, a naming tool, deployment, and a handful of utilities holding the whole thing together. None of it is exotic; the point is that each piece removes a specific bit of friction, and together they let me go from "random idea" to "live thing on the internet" without much fuss.
This is just post #1, so I'd genuinely love to know: what's in your daily stack? If there's a tool you can't work without, tell me — there's a real chance it ends up in a future post. More soon. 🚀
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