Software I am thankful for
Some time between 2020 and last year, when I was pretty burned out, I was talking to a friend —Lenny and he made me realize being happy requires being intentional and that involves giving gratitude pretty much daily and for the smallest things. I do this pretty much everyday since then (agreed, many days I didn't)
I came across this wonderful page by David Crawshaw. It inspired me to note software I am grateful for because I typically don't write about technology (related to my work) in my daily gratitude. A little random chat with Marvin made me actually buy the domain out of joke and also to actually write about software I am grateful for.
I won't bore you, here are the software I am grateful for. I expect this list to grow (into separate posts or as a single post) and I may eventually split into a separate page but meh..let's see.
JavaScript
I am grateful for Javascript first because it fed me and is still feeding me 😅, it made programming easier for me, after learning it I've gone back to learn other languages or ones I used to write before JavaScript and I've found it easier to reason about them. It does pretty much everything too. I am really grateful for this technology.
Redis
It is fast, it is simple and it is damn performant. With JavaScript, you'd be suprised what you could build with redis.
Go
Some people know me to occasionally bash Go but I am thankful for this piece of technology. I love how simple it is, how easy it is to deploy, its damn robust standard library (it has a method/function to validate email, straight out of stdlib!), and the approach it takes to asynchronous programming —go routines. It lets me build robust backend systems quickly.
FFMPEG
FFMPEG surrounds us in various forms and for me the most obvious way for which I am thankful to FFMPEG for is in the TIDAL app. I stream in FLAC/Hi-Fi for the highest audio quality I can get and FFMPEG is running under the hood to make this experience real for me.
TIDAL
This is my daily driver when it comes to music streaming apps and I am really grateful for this app. It has the best audio quality among the streaming platforms I've tried (which is most) and since I listen to a lot of music, this is perfect for me. It saves me a lot of ear fatigue and I really enjoy the music listening experience.
Rust
It makes me get rid of fear of bugs for the most part —if it compiles, take it to the bank (*cough cough, YMMV). It makes programming fearless and for that I am grateful.
The Browser
The browser is a fantastic product that many take for granted but really is hard to make work but I am grateful for this technology. Pretty much my all my professional career revolves around the browser (I am professionally a full-stack developer) and almost anything runs on the browser now, its fucking amazing! I am grateful for this technology and the people who make/made this.
MacOS
Having come from a background where I used windows for a while and even compiled my own audio driver at a point, on Linux. Developer experience wise, i am grateful for MacOS
Utility websites As somebody who does a lot of jumping across different technologies at a time when working, there are some websites I use that are small but handy and have always saved me a lot of stress
Some of these websites do things I could achieve with the numerous editors I use but as someone who spends a lot of time in the browser, its very convenient to have these tools there and I often find it easier to use. I am really grateful for these websites
Github copilot As a recent example, I needed to format image response from the Apple Music API but I was unsure of the format. I fixed this by telling copilot to figure it out, it has saved me hours of manpower on things like this. Its a very great companion when coding because it writes most of the log (formats) and things I tend to repeat often with slight variations. I am very grateful for this software.
There are so many more but at the moment, I think these are the ones that I'd really like to give thanks for the most, at the moment at least.