Overview
On a typical workday, I find myself switching context between analyzing data, writing scripts, managing product initiatives, researching integrations providing technical support, and creating documentation. Because of this, I try to reevaluate my workflow and the tools I use to enable myself every so often. Generally when deciding on tools, I try to choose ones that (A) offer functionality across multiple uses cases for me (rather than having a bloat of applications) and (B) help me move faster.
Here’s a rundown of some of the services/applications I use on a daily basis to help improve my productivity.
Productivity
Notion
It feels like Notion just came into style in the past year or so, but already it’s fairly embedded into my daily workflow. I find it great for storing and creating documentation to share out across the organization and the “databases” feature really allow you to transform any page into a board (this is now where my personal task list resides).
In my personal life I use Notion as well for collating recipes, saving links, planning trips, and other actions.
Slack
Slack always takes me back to the days of IRC and starting off my career in tech, I can’t imagine going to work for an organization that doesn’t use Slack. Looking at Microsoft Teams makes me thankful to always have worked for companies that use Slack. I’ve been enjoying the Huddle feature now as well, even if it needs some polish work done.
Sunsama
Recently, I started using Sunsama as my workload has become more diversified and I found myself struggling with anticipating how busy my day (and week) already was. I would say the foundations of it are fairly simple but it’s a well-designed app that really has refocused how I view planning my day.
Kap
Having used tools like CloudApp in the past, I generally find the built-in screenshots on Mac to be sufficient for my needs.
Adding in Kap gives me the ability to record my screen easily with a lightweight, open-source solution. The snap to window functionality is perfect for my needs and I can record my voice if needed (sorry Loom, I don’t feel the need to put myself on video all the time)
Tango
This is another product that I recently started testing out as the demand for documentation has increased. So far I’ve really enjoyed using it, with the chrome extension doing a great job of screenshotting and highlighting each of the actions I perform. I do question the pricing model per user especially for internal documentation, but so far it has saved me a good chunk of time.
Data & Development
VS Code
This one is pretty self-explanatory but I think it’s a good reminder of how far VS Code has come and the plethora of great extensions now available for it.
JupyterLab
I work with a lot of datasets that I might be seeing for the first time, so I end up doing a lot of data exploration which Jupyter notebooks are perfect for. Using them gives me the ability to easily work my way through analysis while documenting my findings and going off on side adventures.
Generally if I’m working on a script that will eventually be deployed, I’m first going to work out what I want to do in a notebook before switching over to VS Code to “productionize” my work.
Beekeeper Studio
This is fairly lighweight SQL editor that doesn’t necessarily have all the bells and whistles but have all the basics down good. The edit table functionality is really useful for quick changes that need to be made and I find it visually much more pleasing than pgAdmin.
Microsoft Excel
Not much to say here other than this is the trusty tool for every data person. Whenever I have a small dataset that I need to quickly digest, I turn to Excel.
Google Sheets
I included Google Sheets on here because of how easy it is to share. I still think Excel is more powerful (and appreciate that it runs locally), but Google Sheets definitely is a great alternative. If I’m planning to share the data internally or externally, I generally will instead use Google Sheets as a starting point.
Hyper
This is a fun terminal that, again, I find visually pleasing to look at.
GitHub
Another standard entry on this list but one feature I want to call out is the search functionality. Sometimes I’ll be digging into problems that are in code that I haven’t looked at before, so being able to do a repo or organization-wide search is game changer.
Airflow
This one really isn’t a tool but I like to call it out because it gives an easy way to create, deploy and monitor data workflows. When setting up scripts, I like to orchestrate them using Airflow, if nothing more to build a unified location to see all the active workflows and easily spot ones that are failing.
Lucidchart
One of the best ways to convey ideas and how things work are through diagrams, so Lucidchart is always a subscription that I ask for. They have made it really easy to create on the platform and make diagrams look professional.
Postman
Postman is great for testing requests and the collections functionality makes it easy to save requests that I use over and over again.
FileZilla
FileZilla has been my go-to FTP client and never given me a reason to look away. Generally FTPs aren’t exciting (in my opinion), so reliable is good.
Looker
As BI dashboards have evolved, I’ve found Looker to be fairly easy-to-use and appreciated their cloud-first approach as compared to Tableau, which allows for better collaboration. That being said, there’s a lot of new competitors in the space, so excited to check out those in the future.
Miscellaneous
Muzzle
This one I’ve been using for a while! Besides having the best landing page ever, it’s reassuring to know my notifications are turned off when I’m screensharing (I’ve seen my fair share of others fall victim to this trap). I don’t think about this one much but that’s the point.
Magnet
I grew up on Microsoft Windows and while I’m fine with MacOS, the biggest thing I missed was the ability to drag and snap windows. Magnet brings that functionaliy to Mac, which definitely makes it well worth the $8.
1Password
Nowadays, having a password manager is crucial and 1Password has been a great application for myself. The family plan is reasonably priced and the CLI is a pretty nifty tool as well.