As a software engineer, I use a lot of tools for development, debugging, workflows on tasks and I want to list a few of my favorites here. There is no particular order in this list.

List of my favorite Software tools

• Obsidian.md (minimalistic with only Excalidraw plugin. I purchased their Catalyst so I get access to early releases and as a token of love towards the product)
• Tailscale (for all VPN related and device connectivity)
• DataGrip (Thankful to Jetbrains for a community version this year)
• NetNewsWire (one of the best RSS for Apple ecosystem)
• Raspberry Pi Imager
• Postman (still prefer it than Bruno for ease of use and UX)
• Ollama

IDEs

I have tinkered with most of the IDEs out there, but for development, I prefer VSCode to have same workflow across tech stack and minimal context switching.

• VSCode (still prefer GoLand for Go Development)
• Cursor

CLI Tools for AI

Use the models based on the work that I do. ampcode is the best on both free and paid plans.

• Claude Code
• Ampcode from sourcegraph
• Github Copilot
• q cli (now Kiro cli)

Cloud

Cloudflare, by default for personal use.

Cloudflare has everything for my needs; from DNS, registrar, databases D2, images R1, workers, queues, durable objects, secret managers, containers (released early this year). Cloudflare’s free plan is a steal. They are hitting all cylinders on AI workloads too with acquisition of ReplicateAI.

Browsers

• Brave
• Comet (for any research and fluid learning)

Diagramming

• Excalidraw (Diagrams explain more than words, absolute best!)
• dbdiagram.io (Excellent for DB design, uses DBML language)

VSCode Extensions

• DBCode.io (Excellent tool, no context switching with support for several databases)
• Markdown Notebook
• Ruff (from Astral Software)
• Data Wrangler
• Google Colab

CLI Tools

• k9s: Amazing tool for Kubernetes and to navigate through the clusters, deployments, and more. Use it everyday.

• uv: It has become my default python virtual environment and dependency manager. Super fast!

Reading

I use Kindle for reading. Subscribed to Oreilly with ACM subscription for tech books.

Highly recommend Chip Huyen’s AI Engineering book for this year.

Security

• Zoho Vault and OneAuth for all 2FA.
• Yubikey manager for physical Yubikeys with backups.

Subscriptions

• Pragmatic Engineer in Substack.