Productivity Tools for Web Developers

Welcome to Syntax. Today, we have a episode for you on productivity tools. So these are both the apps, but also the the why and the how behind how Scott and I will tackle different things from password management to dos, snippets, mind mapping, writing little scripts, email Sanity, things like that, focus.

We've talked about this a few times over the years, but I'm constantly evolving my own. And I know, Scott, you are as Wes, just constantly trying new things, seeing what sticks. So I thought we'd go through what we're working on with with productivity tools and our approaches to things that help us get a decent amount Deno. I think I wouldn't say I'm the most productive person in the world, but I,

I have 4 kids and managed to get a job done. So I I feel like I have something to say here. Yeah. I would say productivity is one of those things that slides on a scale for me day to day. I do try to always be very productive. I do take it seriously.

And and it's something that for me, I maybe it's just because of how my brain works. If I don't take it seriously, I end up just not accomplishing very much. And when I do take it seriously, I end up accomplishing a lot. And and it's not a means of, like, grind set getting things done, but it's in a mindset of, like, being accomplished and learning a lot and, you know, really feeling like you had something productive at the end of the day, I I think it's a good life hack to feeling satisfied with with your work in total. Yeah. Yeah. If you if you have those wins in life, then you feel good about yourself, and it just kinda snowballs

snowballs out from there. Right? And, honestly, a lot of the stuff on this list is just simply systems and tools that help me get through stuff I either don't want to do or want to get through quicker because Yeah. At the end of the day, I just wanna be coding.

And Yeah. There's certainly lots of productivity hacks in coding itself, but

the rest of life sometimes can can get in the way. So if you can make that easier on yourself, then you're gonna have a better time. Yeah. And to me, as you you'll probably having systems that work for you. Because even, let's say, I'm doing the dishes, right, which I've grown to love doing the dishes in some way. I get to listen to my podcast or, more recently, I've been listening to audiobooks. In fact, I started listening to all the original James Bond audiobooks, and I just started at the beginning of the series. I don't listen to much fiction ever. So for me, this is like a big task. And I'm 3 books in now, and I'm like, oh, this is a great little time. I get a little, fiction book time while I'm doing the dishes, and my system I don't wanna spend very much time with it, so my systems are all in place so that I can finish that up as fast as possible, you know, clean the rest of the downstairs and whatever. So that way I can get on with my evening, because let's face it. By the time the kids are down to bed and everything like that, your evenings are are shorter and shorter these days. But you know what else is shorter and shorter these days, Wes?

The list of issues we have in our century.

Yeah. Actually, ours might not be. It might be a little bit longer, but at least the time to solve those issues has gone down because, we can solve those bugs with century. We know exactly how many people these issues are affecting, you know, what they are, what devices.

We can even get, like, a a really nice session replay to see how it happened so that Wes we're not like, can you reproduce this for us, or I can't reproduce this. We don't need that. We can see how it happened So that way, we can we can solve these bugs faster than ever. So head on over to century.i0forward/ Sanity. Sign up and get 2 months for free with the coupon code at Sanity treat. This podcast is presented by Sentry.

Hey, San Francisco. We're gonna be in town for GitHub Universe on October 28th, and we're doing a syntax meetup. You don't have to be going to the GitHub Universe conference to meet up with us. But if you are in San Francisco, come hang out from 5 to 7 PM, October 28th.

We're gonna be at the Bare Bottle beer garden in Salesforce Park. Admission is free. We're not gonna charge you, but come hang out, and you need to grab a ticket via Eventbrite. So we've put the link in our socials, in the newsletter. We'll put it in the show notes as well. Come check it out. Come hang out. Scott's gonna be there. I'm gonna be there. The whole team's gonna be there. It's gonna be exciting. See you then.

Wes, small update before we get into productivity things. You remember how I I was mentioning there's, like, that, dance battle, that breakdancing competition that I was doing. Wes. The Red Bull one? Yeah. The Red Bull one. So that not only well, 1, I didn't make it. I didn't I didn't make it, but into the the the West Coast finals, which is a big deal because they they had all these, qualifiers throughout the US, then they had the East and West Coast finals, and then they had the US finals.

The guy who did the graffiti on the syntax basketball, Kidd Cruz, not only did he win the Wes finals, he got all the way to the, semifinals of the US finals, and he was all over the news here and stuff. He he just did such a great job. So, shout out to Kidd Crews, a good friend of mine. And, Yeah. If you he did the, graffiti on the syntax basketball. Really cool guy. So huge accomplishment for him. Wow. That's awesome.

Yeah.

Alright. So let's talk password management first. Password management is one of those things that I cannot believe that people live without a password manager. Simply just living life Scott knowing what your password is or sharing passwords or, you have, like, 3 or 4 that you kinda cycle through. 1st of all, it's insecure. But, like, second of all, like, where do you put important stuff? You know? Like, I've got passport numbers and driver's license numbers and the VIN. Like, one thing I need all the time. This morning, I was I went to the dentist, and the dentist says, what's your license plate? I don't know what my license plate JS. So just open 1 password, and I got it. I don't have to walk out and figure out what my license plate number is. It's just little things like that where you're gonna need it at some point. And the amount of times having, of course, having your password stored in something is good, but also just like a secure place to store all of your documents and all of your important numbers

is absolutely key. Yeah. Yeah. I know. When I I see people not using password managers or even worse. This is actually the a worse one, Wes.

Yeah. Well, maybe not worse. I think not using a pass manager, the worst. But Apple came out with their own password manager in a recent update. And, like, sure. If you're not using anything else, use that. But, like, I would never in a 1000000000 years tie my password manager to my OS or my, like, OS of choice. Because, like, what? You you get an Android phone, you you're you're pooch or you get some other device, you're pooched, You everything's stuck in the Apple ecosystem. There's just 1 more thing keeping you there. And that's that is personally why I use 1 password because, one, I think it's, just it's one of the low key hacks for getting up and running on any system really quickly is being able to the first thing you do is get 1 password set up on that system. That's, like, almost the first thing I do. I get a new computer, Linux computer or anything. You know? I set up 1 password on it right away. From there, any login that I could ever need is there for me. I I Node click install or whatever. One click sign in. And and for me, that's, like, such a huge productivity boost that I don't ever have to worry about it. I don't have to think about it. I don't have to go do password reset and go to my email. But like you said, I I do store all kinds of things in there whether it is API keys or or any of that stuff. So that way, if I do lose it for some reason, it's available to me in an easy enough way to get with, like, minimal effort. And then and then, like, you said driver's license, any of that stuff. How many times do you need that information? You you need it quite a bit. So, yeah, 1 password is a super productivity hack for me in general, and I like that it's like again, it's it's not tied to your OS, and it's good software.

Yeah. I used to use, what was it, LastPass, and I always felt like that software was barely holding on. So I I never feel that way with 1Password.

OnePassword is awesome. I know a lot of people are gonna say, what about Bitwarden or whatever? And I'm sure that's awesome. Yes.

And, yeah, it's cool you can host it yourself.

But, honestly, I I've been on 1 password for for many, many years. It just works great. I'm a little bit worried that Apple is gonna start stomping it because every now and then Yeah. Every now and then, the like, Apple puts their own thing where the, like, 1 password button is supposed to be, and then, like, it doesn't doesn't work or, like I don't know. Just every now and then, there's little spots where it's like, this doesn't work, or you can't fill credit cards in.

Recently, they had renounced you can fill credit cards in on Safari, but I don't use Safari. And, like, I want extensions. Those are mostly just Apple qualms, not 1Password qualms, but a little bit worried that they're gonna stomp on it and make it less useful, but

I hope not. That is classic Apple. In fact, like, was a recent thing of them doing that, them, like, removing the feature where you could control the volume of a smart speaker from within Spotify.

So you're in Spotify. You cast to, like, a Chromecast. Before, you could just hit volume up, and it would change the volume of the speaker. Apple, like, nixed that, and so you can't do that anymore. And, of course, everybody goes to blame Spotify. But where can you do it? Of course, you can still do it with Apple Music instead of Apple speakers. You know? So it's like it it always bugs me when they do stuff like that. So I could certainly see that being a a, you know, a stomping on situation, which would be a bummer.

To do applications. So we've talked about to do applications. Maybe we'll just talk about, like, to do approach. You Node? What's our what's our idea? So for me, my to do application is a spot where I can dump things that I want to do at some point. So for me, I I use it to collect ideas for videos that I'm working on. I'll have different projects in my to do application. I use an app called Things. I like it a lot because, a, I've had it for probably 12, 13 years Node. But, b, it's $60.

You buy it once, and that's it. At $10 for the iPhone app. So sorry. It's it's $50 plus 10 for the iPhone app. So $60, you're done. You're not gonna be paying monthly for for a to do application.

And I find that it works really well because I can quickly just add something. I can add in reminders.

And then what I'll do is I'll go through my different projects, and I will organize things into what I want, and then I'll just drag them into my today.

And when I'm working on my today, I will I call it bubbling. I'll just move them up and down into a list. I usually try to put the 1 at the top, which it it's just causing me the most, like, anxiety or making me, like, not want to do it Mhmm. Because that will make me procrastinate. I don't I'm not gonna start any of this, and I don't feel like dealing with that one thing that I'm doing. This email I have to write this, like, taxes thing I have to figure out. So try to put that first and just do it and and get it through.

I'm a big fan of that approach. There's this book called Getting Things Done, by David Allen. It's if you have never read that like, I'm not a I'm not much of a book guy, but if you if you can listen to it on audiobook or something like that, it's a really good approach to if you have, like, a crazy head like I do, Wes just things are going on all the time, and, oh, I shouldn't forget that. I can't forget that or whatever. And I hate paper so much. I can't stand it. This is just such such a great system for dumping everything into your inbox, dragging things into today. You can put tags on them. You can categorize them into different things. It's just a a great way for me to organize my the chaos that is going on in my brain.

Yeah. I am kind of a a book guy. And, actually, I was on, a podcast, Book Overflow, talking about all of my favorite they're supposed to be about developer books, but most of mine ended up being, like, productivity and life books. So if you wanna listen to that, I posted a link to it in the show notes where I I really go deep on all the books that I read for this kind of stuff. You might get even some more productivity tidbits for me out of that. But my my to do strategy has really evolved from yeah. It's evolved from getting things done. But, you know, one thing that I learned about myself is that if it's too fiddly, the system breaks down. If I if I've made my system so intense or so, like, specific where I have to do, like, 8 steps here and there or whatever, I I don't do it. So it needs to be as simple as possible.

So for me, I've settled on tweak.s0.tweek.s0 is my favorite to do app. It's it's dead simple. It's basically just a a grid for the week, to dos of each day. I pay for the, the pro version, which just gives me the ability to, basically color them with labels or schedule them and stuff. I don't even use that. I just use the coloring with labels.

I I think it's alerts maybe. The it doesn't get you very much, but the app is really great, so I don't mind paying for it. And so the only bit of, like, real hard organization I do besides all of my to dos go on a specific day is that I label the ones for work, for syntax. I label those yellow and black just so they stand out from, like, life stuff. That's the only thing I really do JS far as, like, I don't move them up and down in terms of priority.

I don't shift them in terms of, like, what's most important or least important.

What I do is Monday morning, the first thing I do when I get into the office is I go through my email, and I get to inbox 0. If there's anything in my email that requires it to be a task, I put it in my to do list on a day that I can do it. So when it goes into my to do list and it goes into that day, the assumption is is that I will be doing it that day. You know? It's not like Yeah. Someday. It's that day.

And so because of that, I don't like to keep anything in my daily to do list that won't be accomplished that day.

And if a to do doesn't get completed that day, it gets bumped to the next to the bump to the next to bump to the next, whatever. Right? That way, when the next Monday rolls around, and I I've like like, this Monday in particular was Monday rolled around, and I had, like, 8 to dos roll over from last week into this week. And I saw that, and I was like, something's a prob there's a problem here. I either need to do all of these today or I need to figure out if I'm actually going to do them or not. And believe it or not, I did all of them yesterday or redistributed, some of them here and there this week. But for the most part, I did all of them because they were just like little tiny things that you're putting off. Right? And you can only put little tiny things off for so long before it turns into something that you're you're never going to do. So, yeah, Monday is my day to reassess the to dos, Monday morning. That way, it sets me off for a week of where I know what to do every single day. I know what I'm going to be doing, what I have time to do. And if I don't do it, it's because, I'm being lazy or I goofed up or, you know, I missed an opportunity or something came up. You know? So, yeah, I only add things to my daily to do list if I'm going to do it. If I have longer term to do list, I have separate lists for those. This is in tweak.

And these things have no deadline necessarily.

A lot of times, they're ideas or things that need to happen at some point. If they need to happen at a specific day, I will move it to that day. But if it needs to happen at some point in the future, then it goes into one of these lists. I have, like, a someday list, a work list, a honey do list, apps, sick picks, and, like, an on hold for things that I know I'm probably not going to get to anytime soon.

Oh, yeah. I I even use it for just, like, grocery shopping. I just went into my my to do list and Wes looking at what was logged. And it says pineapple, carrots, mushrooms, broccoli.

And it's just for me, I like, when my wife sends me a list of things to get via text message, I always forget something because I can't parse the, like, lines out. There's something with my brain, and I can't look at it. So I'm just like, I need to be able to check it off and to see it go away, and then I just go and and get the next one.

When we do that, we've been using Apple Notes more now that we're a little bit more ingrained in the Bos ecosystem, but we would keep a shared keep list. And my wife is super good about that. If we're heading to Costco beforehand, Courtney will go through and add everything in the Costco ESLint.

And that way, we can split up, divide, and conquer. I can take 1 of the kids. She can take 1 of the kids. We can both crush half the list and be done in half the time. And it's like real time? Yeah. So you're just seeing stuff get checked off. And and she'll start at one end of the store, and I'll start at the other end of the store. And gosh. We're experienced enough costcoers that, like, you know, the list is usually in the order in which you're gonna hit the stuff. So I'll start at the bottom of the list. She starts at the top of the list. We'll meet in the middle of the store. Yeah.

Oh, that's great. I just I just go to Costco with the kids and try to burn as much possible time as I can there. Here we go, get all the samples and try to try to move the day along.

We go on Sunday morning. It's a little, like, chaotic on Sunday mornings. You know?

Oh, man. It my wife will not go to Costco with me on, like, a on a busy day. And, like Yeah. I'm, like, like, a Toronto driver in Costco, you know, just Oh, yeah. Flying out, doing, like, like if you hear the the wheels on the car go, it's because I'm, like, I'm doing one of those, like, burnout turns Yeah. To the next aisle.

Watch out for me. Yeah. That's a lot of fun. And Costco, you could have a whole episode on Costco productivity tips. I am I I'm the type of guy who'll be just throwing stuff in the cart and, paying for it when you get to the front end. You're just like, oh, boy. Too much stuff. I bought too much stuff.

We we tend to go to Costco, like, once a month too, so we'll, like, load up, like, 2 carts a month. Yeah. Yeah. We live super close to it. So I'll often just I'll go, like, once a week or whatever.

Oh, you are that person. We see we see people there that got, like, 3 things in your cart. We're like, why are you shopping here? Like, 1 1 pie. And, like, you I don't have that self control. I go for 1 pie, but I'll come home with, like, basketball net or something like that. Yeah. So Yep. Yeah. I hear you on that one. To do apps in code you have here, do you, what do you use for that? I simply just do a search.

Yeah. Well, I use to do tree as an extension that will show you them all in the sidebar. Oh, that's nice. A lot of people hate to dos. I like to just drop them in low stakes. If it's like a team project and it's a real thing that the team needs to keep track of, what it what I'll do is a GitHub issue. Right? That makes sense. GitHub issue, you have discussion on it. People can Yeah. You can attach it to a PR or whatever. But if I'm working on a feature and I delete something or I wanna come back to something later, I'm just throwing to dos left and right because I will remove them before any PR.

Yeah. Simply because they are just there as a reminder to me for, hey. Don't forget this before you push it up. That's it for me. Yeah. So, to do tree, I I used to dos in my Node, but, again, nothing high stakes, all low stakes stuff. Yeah. I I do the same thing as well when I'm, like, scaffolding it out. So, for example,

I built the, like, the new user submission form for the spookies and the potluck or whatever. And I was like, I'm just gonna get this thing working.

So I put a to do in there, say, oh, make sure you, like, add rate limiting and make sure you add Mhmm. A Captcha. And, like, there's all this stuff that I needed to make sure that I added, but I needed to do that later. Right? I needed to do it. So I'll just throw a to do in there. And I also use this, Versus Node extension called better comments, and that will highlight your to do comments in different colors. That's really helpful.

I like that as well. Yeah. To dos for me, I think they they do really they do really help. I you know? Because I will forget a whole section of the I'll be like, and then if I don't have a to do there or something like that, I could forget a whole dang file that I modified and didn't fix or you know? Just by creating the file, my brain says, oh, that's done. You know? You push that. So yeah.

Snippets.

I'm an extremely heavy snippet user myself, so I've switched snippets. I was on Text Expander for many, many years, and I Mhmm. Finally moved over to Raycast once they supported almost everything that I wanted.

And I I find them to be very helpful for for kind of 2 things. First, things that you're writing all the time. You know? Like, we get a bazillion emails for people who Yarn, like like, want people to come on this podcast. You know? And it's almost all time, it's, like, not like, don't feel bad if you're asking about this podcast if you're actually a listener. It's almost always just like some oh oh, this person wrote a .net book 14 years ago, and, like like, they have a PR company trying to to get them on. Or, like, this crypto Bos is needs some needs some pump and dump, so let's bring them on podcast. And, like, they are incessant about emailing, and they're just they follow-up. It's all automated. It's all garbage. It's so obnoxious.

So what I'll do is I'll just have, like, these little snippets of, like, hey, or, like, the I have this one called Wes s. So if I type colon u s s, it says, hey. I appreciate the email. You are great, and this looks awesome. I don't have any need from this. Please unsubscribe me and stop any future drip sequences from following up. Thanks again. Having a good day. Because, otherwise, I would be a jerk when I'm mad.

Yeah. So I need to have So good. A very clear pointed way to say, stop emailing me. Do not email me ever again. And that's just like a a quick one you can you can do in there. So, like, customer service, common replies that you have are are one of them. And then the other one is just things like my one of my pet peeves is using the wrong x.

Yes. I always get mad at everybody for not using the multiplication x, and they use the the letter x, and it's not slanted the right amount. So I have little shortcuts for that. I have little shortcuts for all of the arrows Mhmm. Like the Unicode arrows.

So I have a shortcut for a ghost space. So if you're trying to use an an at sign on Twitter, Node like, oh, does anyone know how to use CSS at imports or at media? It'll, like, try to link that someone's name.

So I have a shortcut called colon zedwj, which is a a Deno width joiner, and it's basically just a ghost space. And then it will it will break that automatic highlighting that that is in there. So I have I have tons of these little Sanity little ones in there along with the customer support ones

Yeah. And, like, addresses too. Sorry. Go ahead. No. Yeah. I wish I you know, snippets are one of those things that I feel like I I don't categorize my myself, like, enough when I'm working to say, oh, I'm doing this too many times. I should make a snippet for it. You know? For some reason, I I don't do that enough.

But what I what I do do is I I have, like, 1 or 2 snippets that I use insanely frequently, you know, like a valid, test credit card and stuff like that. I know you have your whole flow for that.

But one of them was just my email because my email is kind of long. My name is kind of long. Yep. And having to type that out, especially on my phone or on my computer frequently, is just a giant pain. So, like, that's the my most used snippet is s at JS my snippet.

And, that knows it's like, okay. It's an email that I'm I'm writing Scott at. So Yeah. I use that very frequently. I do use Raycast for my snippets, and I do find them to be lovely. I do the, colon x as well to give me the Wes Boss x. The boss. So

I I use the ampersand ampersand.

And then you I also set it up on Bos to give me my email because, yeah, I hate typing my email address. It's it's Vercel. And my my address as well when people need it. And then I also have a whole bunch of, like, coding snippets in Raycast for things like, box sizing. Border Bos is 1 I use a lot. CSS reset, I use a lot, and then, like, markdown back ticks. So if I do colon j s or colon t s, it'll do That's so smart. 3 back ticks, j s. And because I put those in Raycast because it's it doesn't make sense to put them in Versus Node because I'm writing those in Notion, in GitHub things. I'm writing them in CodePen sometimes, Discord. You're writing them all over the place. So if I'm writing a snippet, I'll try to say, does it make sense to do it outside of Versus Code so I can use it everywhere?

Yeah. That's a good idea. Man, I, yeah, I I I agree that that's my, like, barometer for whether or not I should be, creating a a snippet inside of Versus Node or outside. It's like, where do I need to use this? Because, like, my Svelte snippets that I use in Versus Code that I wrote myself using simple snippet in Versus Node, it's like, those are fine to stay in Versus Code. I'm never writing those outside of, my text editor. But, yeah, this this kind of stuff makes a lot of sense. I find with Copilot, I don't actually use coding snippets as much. I still use

Emmet quite a bit for scaffolding out HTML very quickly in in in JSX, but I don't use the, like, too many custom snippets in Versus Code anymore.

Yeah. Yeah. I I Node Cursor has changed that for me as well where I do feel like I'm just not I'm just It's kinda hosting this Node. Yeah. Yeah.

Interesting.

Mind mapping. So mind mapping is this idea where you Wes you have to plan out something. Like, for me, when I want to plan out a course or I wanna plan out a conference talk or whatever, often, it's simply just a brain dump of I need to include these things or this is what my thoughts are and being able to move it into a oh, wait. It's not a three d space. What would you call the the space that a mind map is? You know? It's kind of just a spatial space. Yeah. Yeah. Spatial space where you can drag and drop and reorder and bring things from one to another and and rename and basically just sort of, like, get your ideas in order. I find that to be extremely helpful when I'm trying to when I'm in the early stages of planning something, and I use one called Node. I've been using it for many, many years. It's a fantastic little application where you can just plan out a course or plan out a conference talk, and, it's when it comes time to actually doing it, I I I've always wanted something that is both note taking and mind mapping in Node.

Yeah. I have not hit that just yet. Well, I'll talk about some I tried in just a sec, though. Yeah. I don't know if I've ever wanted that note taking. I guess, you know, Obsidian can do kind of some of that stuff. But, you know, for me, I I use FigJam primarily to do my mind mapping. I love the UI for it. I think it's super smooth, super easy.

I like that when you're doing, like, a multiplayer FigJam, you can, like, throw stickers and drop, you know, stuff on there and react to it. And recently, they said you can create slides from the Node too, like, if you wanna do a presentation.

So I'm actually using the Figma slides to do my presentation for Svelte Summit.

And I'm having a hard time going from code to a visual UI to do slides. I found it to be, like, way more tedious for some reason. You think it'd be the other way around. But I found it to be so tedious to get it. And I also found that the, Figma my Node to slides do not work how I wanted it to, but I think it's an option if it, yeah. Maybe it's just like how I was trying to use it. There's not a lot of guidance. I think it's too new for that. So there there's stuff here. I I think, a lot of these are interesting options. But for me, yeah, mind mapping fig jam is really super great. In fact, we're using it right now on some cool stuff. So I I almost wish that Notion had,

like, built in mind mapping. I know you can, like, hack it and whatever, but it's not very good. Because the way that Scott and I put episodes together is we will kinda do that. We'll dump a whole bunch of high level topics, and we'll dump a whole bunch of ideas. And we'll we'll basically just do indentation of bullet points, which is

kind of mind mapping, but I think it would be kind of nice to have a bit more of a visual look at it. Yeah. I agree. Yeah. I know. I I do. My brain does function largely in to do list, though, or not to do. It's like a indented list and outlines now.

So So next one is a big one. It's just note taking. You know, everybody has their favorite note taking app.

Some people refer to this as a second brain sometimes depending on how you set it up.

And, you know, I've used Figma for or not Figma. I've used Notion for this in the past.

Notion just feels a little too clunky for me for it to be like my full on note taking app. Mhmm. One reason it's proprietary.

It's being saved to a database. Whatever.

I like my notes to potentially not be stuck in the software that I wrote it. So my note taking app of choice is Obsidian, which uses markdown.

And you can write markdown and it's nice. For the most part, working in Obsidian is like a hybrid between v s code and Notion.

You get a lot of the great stuff from Notion, but it still feels a little bit more like a text editor. A lot of the v s code shortcuts still work. Like, if I wanna move a line up and down, I can hold the option key and hit the arrow keys like I can in Versus Code. So I can be reasonably assured that my Versus Code, shortcuts are gonna work. And for a long time, my big issue was, like, it just didn't feel UI enough. But now the I don't know when this changed. Probably not that recently. At the start of each file, if you do a 3 hyphens to do the front matter, it actually gives you, like, that exact same kind of Notion UI Wes you have a property and value and whatever. And so, like, if I wanna tag a specific file in the past, I had to, like, write those tags in markdown. But now I actually get, like, a UI, and I visually can see all the tags and all the tags I previously had and stuff. And I'm adding this metadata whether it's created at or, any of that stuff. I'm adding all that via markdown at the top of my file in a UI sort of way that I really enjoy.

And, one thing that Obsidian does really well is it has this massive community, plug ins, community plug ins, you know, first party supported plug ins. And some of those are incredible. Like, I have one that creates a new let's say I open Obsidian today, Wes. It automatically creates, when I open it, a notes file for today.

That way, if I open it, I just have a file, blank file, labeled for today, ready to go. And I can just start typing. I can tag it. I can link to other files really super easily. I like that if I write a link to a file and that file doesn't exist, I hit command, click on it, and it creates that file in the location that I made the link for. Oh, yeah. It's kinda Versus Node. That's nice. There's just so many great things. And the best part is it's a folder full of markdown. Yeah. So, like, you can take that anywhere. You can write blog posts in here. I can move those blog posts to anything.

It's just a really nice really nice little service, and there's just so many

there's so many edges to this thing that has more functionality than you may expect. So, yeah, Obsidian is just it's the goat for me. It's great. Man, I I tried Obsidian a few times over the years, and I've always found myself going back to what I've been doing, which is simply writing markdown files in Versus Node. And I always did that because I felt like, oh, it's this is not I don't this is not my Versus Node. You know? Like, then you gotta send all the shortcuts up, and and then all the syntax highlighting is a little bit different. And I felt like, this is not as good as my Versus Node, but I just opened it for the 1st time in a couple years. It's and and what you're saying. I think I'm gonna try it again because I've wanted it to may work so much. I've I feel like I've been trying to find a better note taking app than simply just markdown files. That's what I've been using for probably 10 years. I wrote a book in it. I published Yes. Something like 70 different JavaScript guides.

I have hundreds of blog posts, all marked down, all written in my code editor. You know? So I tried Stashpad for quite a while, which I was pretty excited about.

Stashpad is kind of, like, markdown and and, like, a mind mapping all in Node, which is what I've been saying I want for a long time.

But, again, it was like there was no there's no way to, like, move your data out of it. I let my trial expire, and all my notes were locked in unless I upgraded to the paid one. I was like, alright. Screw this. You know? Like, I'm not not paying $14 a month, and then, like, let them jack the price up on me once they the investors want their money back. It was a cool product. It didn't work as good as I wanted.

And, oh, Stash Scott just put a link in here. Stashpad is winding down operations.

Oh, interesting. So, like, like September 30th. So it's donezo. It's donezo today. So yeah. 30. Oh, well, maybe my,

I did I think I did have some notes in there, so they're probably gone. Node for good. Let that be a thing. So I tried Sashpad.

A lot of people told me try Observable HQ Yeah. Which is a kind of a hosted Jupyter Notebook.

I just I couldn't get into it. I just want my my Versus Node working on it. And I also I think you pay for it. Yeah. You gotta pay for it. $22 a month. That's not worth it to me. It's a cool it's a cool thing, though. Yeah. I don't use it, but it's cool. It's more for, like, data data people. So what I am trying to move to right now is Jupyter Notebooks, which is what Observable HQ is built on. Jupyter Notebooks are huge in the Python because what it lets you do is you can write markdown, and then you can inline Node, and you can run that code right inside of the file and see the actual output, which is as somebody who writes lots of technical stuff, that's kinda exactly what I want. I want all of my TypeScript types and inference. I want all of that to work inside of my markdown. Like, when I wrote my TypeScript course, I would have to duck out to a TypeScript file and and actually do the example because I wanted the full TypeScript inference. But Jupyter Notebooks now has a Deno engine, so you can run not just Python, but you can now run JavaScript on it. We talked about it when Ryan Dahl came on the podcast. So I'm really hoping that I can make the move. Next time I start, like, a new project, I'm gonna try go all in Jupyter Notebook.

I would like sincerely love, for you to spend some time doing that because I don't have the time to do it, but I want to get a good report on what's Yeah. What's it like. Yeah. It's so I did try it for a while, and I even posted, like, a little guide on Twitter on how to get it set up.

And, it was it worked pretty good. You know? Like, it's it's it's really cool that you can write Node, and then, like, I would say, alright.

Here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna filter this array down for items that only have this type, and then you can click the button and and run the code and see the output right underneath it. And then you can also write adapters for what the output looks like.

So if the output is simply just data, you can just display the data. But if the output is HTML,

you can embed the HTML right below it. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I I'm I'm curious. I just I'm a little bit worried it's gonna be one of those things where, like you said, you gotta fuss with it too much. And then it's you're spending time being Wes a notebook enthusiast and not somebody who's actually getting work done. Well, then you could get a course out of it. Right? You could start the Yeah. That's true. I like it. Yeah. Start the engines there. Next is this little TypeScript, and these are just scripts that you might have around on your computer to run various things. I don't run pnpm scripts, and I'm interested at, like, snippets to know what you're running. The one I run the most is to remove all node modules folders recursively.

You know, those things, they accumulate on your computer. And next thing you know, it's taken up gigabytes worth of space depending on how many projects you have. So for me, sometimes I'll just run a recursive removal node module script and get that stuff out of here, for a directory or even, like, my entire site folder or any of that stuff.

Yeah. I'll often need to do things like, download all the images from a a folder. So, like, we have all these syntax background, grunge, and there's, like, a 190 of them. Right? So I just wrote a quick little script to, visit the web page, scrape all the links, download them, and save them to disk. You Node? Just a quick little stuff where I could do this or, like, renaming files or making something consistent. I could figure out how to do this via the UI, and I could click it here and there, but it's much more enjoyable and sometimes even faster to, to write a little script for it. So I just simply write scripts and then either run them via Deno, BUN, or TSX.

Yeah. But there's also John Lindquist has this little app called ScriptKit, which is is it looks like Raycast. It's not really the same area, but it's just like resizing an image. Converting an SVG to a JPEG is another one that I have to do all the time Wes it's like, oh, I try to drag an SVG into my video editing software, and it it doesn't work. You know? So having a little library of commonly done things, stripping types from TypeScript is another Node.

Scraping images off of a file, downloading all of the sale items from Canadian Tire's website. You know? I've all these I probably have hundreds of these, like, little random scripts on my computer that I'll I'll dip into every now and then. I've never gotten into ScriptKit, but I feel like I should.

Yeah. It's a type of thing I wouldn't mind just having, like, a directory of scripts around, just on my own to to run whenever. But I think JS long as you can read the scripts and let you know what you're doing, writing little scripts in the era of chat g p t to me has become so much more useful because I will suffer through doing something by hand instead of writing a script sometimes just because I don't feel like opening it up and testing it and making sure it works. But if I can get chat g p t to spit me out a simple script, I can go over it line by line by line, confirm that everything is what I would have done, tweak it as needed, and then run it. That sometimes to me can be very fast. Like, the other day, I asked it while we were at, Denver TypeScript. I asked it to go through the page of, Wes it meetup.com, grab everybody's name who had RSVP'd to be at the meetup.com, and then enter them into the raffle that CJ had written. And it took, like, seconds.

Just effortlessly fast. So I think that can be a Node little boost if if you know what you're doing.

Next up is email. Email is such a big thing. I think a lot of people, they do email kind of chaotically. I tend to do the opposite of that. I'm very invested in my email process in a way. 1, I spend money on it, which seems ridiculous. Let me tell you. I use I use Superhuman, which JS, like, the email client of choice for all of the people who are, you know, super productive CEO types. Right? Which it's ridiculous. I when I saw the pricing for Superhuman, I was like, there is not a chance in the world I care about this enough to to spend money on this.

And, man, I gotta say, I've been using Superhuman now for, like, a year and a half, 2 years.

And even though I was able to get to inbox 0 fairly regularly before, nothing has made me as productive at email as superhuman. It you go down their feature list, Wes, and it looks like a 1000 other email clients, I swear. But something about it, you can navigate the whole app through effortless keyboard shortcuts.

Yeah. It's it's local first in a way that every single email loads instantly. There's no lag ever.

If I want to do anything, I hit a key hit a key hit a key, either unsubscribe or trash all or filter or snooze or whatever. I'm so efficient with it that I can get to inbox 0 Node in no time. And then when you do get to inbox 0, it gives you a fun little, video of animals, which so stupid, but I love it. I I'm I I talked so much trash about superhuman before actually using and subscribing to it. And now I'm like, this is I'm gonna pay for this app. So yeah. I I've I've been hooked on it, and then Sanity, it's I'm paying for it for sure. Yeah. Sometimes

those things are are worth it. You know? Like, I'm not I'm not the guy that lives loves paying monthly for things. But when something does take the pain out of your day, which is something that all of us hate, which is doing email, it's it's worth it. Right? I I use Missive, which is we've we've had them on the show before. It's fantastic application. So Missive is more for teams that need to be able to Scott share email, but, like, kind of assign it. So I have multiple email addresses being piped into Missive.

And then you can like, if it's a customer support, I can just write to the, my assistant and say, hey. What's going on here? Or this person is not seeing all of their courses when they log in. Maybe it's under or whatever. And then I can just assign it to somebody else, and then they get it dumped into their missive inbox. And it's a really nice way to sort of do it. I still am garbage at email because the the one thing I really want like, my biggest problem is just, like, there's just too much stuff that comes in. And I find, like, even with all the filters and and tagging and all that under the world, I feel like I'd still just get way too much garbage coming in, and I unsubscribe from absolutely everything. But, like, even, like, we get a pull request on the syntax, web, thing. I get, like, 17 emails from GitHub about what's going on there, and it's just like Oh my god.

Get this out of here. You know? And, like, that time's a 1,000 different Vercel. And, also, I don't really want to spend a lot of time sort of filtering through it. The one thing I really do want, though, is I want the ability to tag, with AI. So Missive has the ability to reply with AI. You put your little open AI key in there, and you can highlight something and say, summarize this for me or reply nicely. You can make your own prompts. Right? But what I want is the opposite. I want every email that comes in to be filtered through AI, and I wanna be able to say, like, does this look like somebody from a PR company is trying to get somebody on our podcast? If so, immediately reply to them, or if so, just tag it with whatever because I find, like, the actual important stuff is is hard to find through all the cruft that that comes into my email inbox.

Yeah. On on that note of superhuman and inbox 0, Wes, I found out that it gives you stats.

In the past year, I have hit inbox 0, 182 of the 365 days. I have a 29 day streak of inbox 0 right now. And, like, so I'm I'm legitimately

able to do that. And I have, what, 3 different email addresses. So Yeah. Yeah. What do you do about, like, transactional email? Like, you get a like, I'm just looking at my email address right now. So CloudFlare. Your invoice is available. CloudFlare. Your domain is renewed. Your dentist, you have appointment coming. Google Search Console performance for the month. Spotify, upcoming premium subscription is is being increased. You know? Like, that plus 40 other just this morning.

Do you just delete them?

No. There's a mark JS done. You just hit the mark as done key.

Yeah. Which is But, like, you don't you don't auto filter them or anything. You don't have any system for getting through all that crap?

I I tend to treat the emails that come in as, like, stuff I need to pay attention to. And then I can see from the list view if it's something I need to open. If it like, I like to keep that stuff, but I don't need to action item it. And since, again, superhuman is instant and it has keyboard shortcuts, I my my current one is highlighted. I hit the e key. Next Node highlighted, e key. E e Node.

Just and and e key. Yeah. You dwindle dwindle it down so fast. And so for me, I check email first thing in the morning when I get into work. I get into work. I check my email. I get it to inbox 0. If it's something that I can't take care of right now, I put it in my to do list, and then I snooze the email for when I'm going to plan on doing it. So that way it does show back up, and that way, I can confirm I did it. And then I check it again at the end of the day before I leave work. Not even, like, the very end of the day, like, 3 o'clock ish for me. And then, again, I get down to inbox 0.

Reason being is, like, you never get overwhelmed that way. And if Yeah. You know, if you treat everything like a to do, nothing just sits in your inbox, which I can't have. And I unsubscribe for from everything religiously like crazy. And and so I do love that, like, any of these mail apps that build in, like, a new like, this has a keyboard shortcut for unsubscribing. So, like, I do that on anything that I see. Oh, that's great. Yeah. The the snooze is also you absolutely have to have snooze because what happens is when people are going through their email, they hit something like,

I I have to do this, but I don't wanna do it now.

I need to do it at some point, and then they just, whatever. Close the email app. You know? But if you can snooze it, you you keep on that roll, you know, the icky roll that Scott's talking about here. Yeah. You're just keen. I know. I know. Snooze to me is one of those must have things that I it's shocking that, like, every email client in the world isn't, like, defaulted to that. I first pick up Snooze

with Google Bos. And Google inbox to me was, like, the best in, yeah. Yeah. I do I certainly miss that. But snoozing and and all those things, I I gotta have it. Get it out of there. Get down to 0. Another thing I like about it that you know, I'm just not gonna go on about superhuman. But when you unsubscribe from something, Wes, it gives you an option to unsubscribe and mark all JS done or unsubscribe and trash all. So, like, let's say, you've been on it and an been put on a newsletter subscription ESLint that you do not care about, you never want to see again, unsubscribe and trash all. Or what if it's, like, something that's coming in regularly that you kind of want to still unsubscribe and mark Deno. So if you were the type of person that has, like, a massive list of emails,

in your inbox, you could cut through that pretty quickly, I think. Yeah. One other thing I like about Missive is if you get, like, a lot like, I get a lot from GitHub.

I'll often just you you could click on the person who's sending it to you, and you can say all from this person or all from this domain.

And just click on it, and it'll immediately filter your entire inbox for all of those. And then I'll just command a, command backspace, and just blow them all out. And that helps me get down from you know, you got 300, and you go, that brought it down to 125. Alright. We're doing a bit better now.

Totally. Yeah. Here's a here's a couple more before we get out of there. I use my habit tracker. There's a 1,000,000,000 habit trackers. I find them to be very helpful. My habit tracker JS Sanity path Scott I o. I check-in with this thing every day to make sure that I'm maintaining the positive habits that I want in my life.

Even things like doing handstands every day or making a to do list or doing, you know, cardio or stretching the kind of stuff that just like you want to make sure that you're staying on top of. And so for me, it's very gratifying to not just have streaks, because I don't think I think streaks can be a little discouraging sometimes.

But for me, it's more or less about alright. I have, things I would like to see. And the more I see those things checked, the better I am about it. So it's I'm I'm definitely motivated by a habit tracker type of system. It's allowed me to instill a lot of positive habits in my life.

Another one is focus apps. I use heyfocus.com to block all social media and stuff on my computer.

If I'm working, I'm the classic person who will close Twitter and then open it again in a second or Reddit. Yeah. And Reddit for me is the worst one. I will close Reddit and then, like, command w on Reddit, command t, start typing in Reddit. Like, my brain is just so broken with that stuff. So I need something to step in there and stop it. So heyfocus.com is the app I use. But another one I use for notifications and turning off all that stuff is just the Apple Focus shared focus modes. Yeah. I use those share across all my devices. I have them set up really completely. I have like, my wife can text me at any time, and there will be that notification that will come through at least some sort of way.

But if anybody else does, no notifications.

Other than that, I shut off notifications for most all apps. Like, I don't ever have notifications on for email. I will not get a notification for an email no matter what. It's pretty much just text messages for me that I get, notifications for. Yeah. I have I have just email and texts

and Twitter DMs. But, otherwise, no Twitter.

No no TikTok. Every time I open TikTok, it's like, hey. Turn on notifications. Like, no chance. No. No chance I'm doing that. Zero chance. Yeah. I would rather,

jump off a bridge, I think, than have Twitter notifications on.

How often do you throw this, hey, focus on? Because I haven't done it in a while, but I I think I need it. Especially after I post a video, I'll go to, like, at, like, the 7 websites that I posted a video to and then see what people are commenting, and that's good because I can reply. But at a certain point, I gotta just get working on the next one. Yeah. I I

if I let's say I open Reddit twice in the span of 15 minutes, something will happen in my brain and I'll say, Scott, what are you doing, man? Like, I I feel like the moment I feel disappointed with myself for, opening Reddit too many times, I then turn it on. You know, it'd be nice to have it on a schedule. One thing that, I had to tweak it because, like, I do a lot of work on YouTube. So I don't block YouTube, but I also don't have the problem of mindlessly watching YouTube. I I do mindlessly watch YouTube, just not when I'm at work. For some reason, I have no problem with that. So alright. So those are our productivity

tips and tricks and apps.

Let us know if you have any thoughts. Every time we do these, I get really good recommendations for people.

There was Node I was trying to forget, remember when I said I want my own, like, personal Pinterest for logging things that I find. You know? It's not just bookmarks, but just dumping stuff into. Someone sent me a really good one,

and I totally forgot to check it out. So if you know what that is, send it to me again. I'd love to hear it. I, I started making a delicious clone for that really reason, and then I got bored. So I stopped doing it, but that feels like something that I would love to have too.

Maybe maybe once my site kit is done, I can just fire up a delicious clone. Yeah.

Beautiful. Alright.

Let's go into sick picks. You got a sick pick for me today? Oh,

yeah. Yeah. I had a, you know, I like podcasts. I've been pod I've listened to podcasts for a long time. Right? I like podcasts. Yeah. I I like podcasts. Yeah. There's a a fun new podcast from, I think, Jamie Loftus Loftus.

She does a lot of podcasts. She's a fun kind of Internet personality, but it's called The Legend of Sword Quest.

Let me read you the trailer for this thing. It's one of these limited run series. It's from Iheart. So what started as a promotion for a new Atari game would become one of the most controversial moments in eighties pop culture.

I I doubt that's the case because I've never heard of this before this.

With a central mystery that's consumed fans for decades, what happened to the missing sword quest prizes to unlock the biggest mystery in video game history? I never heard of this. Basically, there was like a video game competition for a lot of money, and you have it it's like a fun little documentary podcast.

The one thing I like about it is a lot of times with these, they'll they'll have, like, a big last time on the podcast and then, like, 10 minutes of information. And then Yeah. Next time this is not that. It's, like, actually just good interviews and the people you know, it's a bunch of video game players from the eighties and stuff talking. So it's just fun. There's only 5 episodes out as of right now, but it's it's still coming out. So if that sounds interesting to you, it's a nice little miniseries there.

I've also been listening to a new podcast lately called The Economics of Everyday Things, and it's for people who like, like, Sanity money or how I built this. And it goes into the just these areas of life and explains how it works. You know? Like, how does the sushi fish supply chain work? Or, like like, where do truffles come from? How does money laundering work? You know? Why do we need so many firefighters? And it's all it's all just a really good listen. You know? Really interesting.

Comes up some nice facts that you can share with your friends, but also you learn a thing or 2.

Yeah. Cool. I like that. I gotta I gotta check that out. Thanks for the suggestion. Alright. Thanks everybody for tuning in. We will catch you later.

Peace.