Toolbelt

This is my hardware and software setup, along with my review of the tools I’m currently using.

Hardware Setup

• Operating System: Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS
• Processor: AMD® Ryzen 3 3200g with Radeon Vega graphics × 4
• Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-A320M-S2H Ryzen 2nd Gen Ready M-ATX
• RAM Memory: x2 Memory ADATA DDR4 16GB 3000MHz XPG Gammix D30
• Power Supply Unit: Sentey SDP650-FX 650W Solid Power 80 Plus
• Case: Aerocool Bolt Black
• Keyboard: HyperX Alloy FPS Pro Mechanical Gaming Keyboard
• Mouse: Logitech M90
• Headphones: HyperX Cloud 2
• Monitor: x2 LG 24" IPS VGA HDMI Full HD FreeSync 24MK430H-B
• Speakers: Genius SP-HF280

Software Setup

• Time Management: Clockify (upd: no longer fits in my workflow)
• Knowledge Base: Visual Studio Code
• Code Editor: Visual Studio Code
• Tasks Management: TickTick (upd: payed for it and happy about it 🎉)
• Work Communications: Slack
• Spaced Repetition: Anki (upd: lost the habit, but eager to start it again 😪)
• Web Browser: Brave (upd: it broke some pages, so I had to shift to Chromium)
• Money Management: RealByte’s MoneyManager (upd: using adhoc Google Sheets now)

My Software Review

Time Management - Clockify

Clockify is an awesome piece of software. It exists in all forms, as a web application, native application, Android & Mac app, and even as a browser extension.

It allows for custom reports from the data you’ve tracked, over any custom period of time, and it costs nothing. I not only track work sessions with this tool, but also personal tasks.

Knowledge Base - Visual Studio Code

I’ve used Zim Desktop for more than 2 years as my knowledge base and it was rock solid. I purposely chose not to have anything that was even a tiny bit difficult to set up or that it could have any problems with exporting (such as a personal wiki).

Zim was the correct tool for a lot of time, but I felt the need for a neater and more modern look. It’s no secret that user experience matters.

I decided to go with the simplest and easiest solution of them all, a folder with markdown files, opened in Visual Studio Code, and tracked with Git.

I improvised the missed Zim journal functionality by having the following folder structure:

journal/
    2019/
    2020/
        07/
        08/
            01.md
            ...
            28.md
            29.md

Jumping to today’s date was immediate in Zim, but can also be done quite fast in Visual Studio Code by using CTRL + P and typing today’s date.

I miss having integrated TODO tasks though, but those can be managed with an external, specialized tool, and that has the advantage of being available on your phone too.

Code Editor - Visual Studio Code

Of course Visual Studio Code is also an incredibly great software to do software development, its integration with Git is one of its strongest points.

Once upon a time I wanted to be a master of Git, trying to learn all of Git concepts and commands, but this didn’t work as well as I wanted since I never got to streamline my workflow neatly. Instead, I found myself googling or reading man pages on how to do common tasks.

Some Visual Studio Code extensions and Github are nowadays working as frontends for Git, they trivially solve 99% of all the tasks I might want to do with Git, and for the other 1% I am more than willing to spend time refreshing concepts on the moment to get the task done correctly.

Among the things I find really useful are beautifully comparing between everything, seeing the history for changes for any particular file, working with Github pull requests directly from the editor, and seeing trivially who and when the last change to a file was made (with GitLens).

Tasks Management - TickTick

TickTick is awesome, the free features are enough for me to have my tasks organized, and I can use it both on desktop and on my mobile device.

I deactivated the feature to guess information like due date and priority based on text since it raised many false positives, and I love that I don’t need to categorize a task before adding it so that if it is a quick task it can be tracked without much hassle.

I don’t like that I can’t mark a task as “not-completed”, but I instead mark it as completed and I then delete the completed task.

I also don’t like the implementation on recurring tasks since marking one of those as completed accidentally creates the next task to be done in the sequence, but then you can’t easily go back, but it’s more than understandable.

All of those negative points are nothing compared to the value it offers, it has a nice looking UI and things are really intuitive.

Work Communications - Slack

There are some things I don’t like about Slack, but I understand it’s the best and most known product for work communications out there.

The biggest competitor being the free Zulip, but there are some discrepancies between these two that I feel make much more sense on Slack, for example, the way channels and threads are managed. Also new messages on phone are quite confusing on Zulip, and I don’t like the UI that much.

Even with these problems Zulip provides capabilities that Slack, in its free version, just doesn’t.

An example of something that I don’t like on Slack is the way they manage accounts and workspaces, I wished I had a single Slack account that can be suscribed to different workspaces (this could be done even if the Slack instances are stored in different servers with OAuth2).

But looking at the bright side, it’s pretty intuitive, it has great support for all kind of bots and automations, it works, and it’s even fun (e.g. you can add custom emojis and reactions).

Spaced Repetition - Anki

I dislike Anki a lot 🙃 but it is the only tool that I know that meets my requirements with respect to spaced repetition.

For these types of tools, I expect almost instant-time creation of new cards so that I’m not bothered while I’m working through some material. I love to be able to paste images from the clipboard to Anki (this is a delight considering that I can take screenshots of a section of the screen with CTRL + SHIFT + PRNT SCRN).

The app works, which is the most important part, but as I mentioned, user experience matters, and Anki is much more complicated than it needs to be. I’d love to have an abstraction layer over it that only allows you to use 5% of its features (which are enough for 95% of people) in exchange of providing top-notch UI/UX.

If you don’t do your reviews for some days, they will start accumulating, and you can’t reset, which is intended to make the app work as expected, but looking at your Anki review having more than 200 cards to do doesn’t seem appealing and makes people skip another day. Implementing something like reviewing for X amount of time each day would be great.

I’m a relatively new user to this space repetition technique, and a lot of the value that you get out of this app depends on the work you put in. How to correctly work with Anki is an open problem, but I’m experimenting to see what works and what doesn’t.

Web Browser - Brave

In my opinion, Brave is the best of the chromium-based browsers, although I don’t enjoy some of the default settings, after a bit of tweaking it suits my needs perfectly.

I only advice a bit of care, as Brave Shields have broken some websites functionalities/visuals and that’s also the very reason I don’t use their ad-block.

I used Firefox and Vivaldi for a big while before getting back to Brave, I found Firefox felt more cluttered and sluggish than most chromium-based browsers, and Vivaldi failed me on some situations I don’t remember.

Money Management - RealByte’s Money Manager

I can’t believe how incredibly difficult it is to google and find a good and free personal finance manager, you get recommended GnuCash, YDAB, Quicken, etc., yet, this app appears near the first place for money management apps, and it quickly solves most of the problems.

I feel it could get more complicated to handle some situations like recurring income/expenses, these are supported, but they are handled automatically and a review isn’t enforced before them being added.

I felt really bad about this not having a web app, but now I believe that I don’t really need it. Backups are uploaded to Google Drive if you like.

An important catch is that you will have to recommend this app to at least some friend so that you unlock infinite amount of cash/loan/liability/etc accounts, otherwise, the limit of 15 makes it quite unusable. Recommend another one and you can have the PC manager (which I don’t yet have!).

The only double-entry bookkeeping you need to know is that all transactions involve two accounts, one from where the money comes, and other where the money goes. Then just know that income is creating money out of nowhere, and expenses are wasting that money on stuff, and that’s it, you are able to use it.

Conclussion

These are the tools that are helping me get the job done, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time to get to discover them, so if you have any recommendation for excellent software, for any purpose, then don’t hesitate to tell me!