My Top 10 Tools to Work Remotely as a Software Engineer

This is going to be quick and to the point. Here are my top 10 tools to work at my best.

Focus and Productivity

1. Freedom to create distraction-free hours. It allows me to block both my phone and laptop from distracting apps and websites. Currently, the only apps that I allow are apps I need for my work + research(like Reddit and YouTube). All other social media are blocked. I block myself from 5 AM to 5 PM every day, and from 9PM to 5AM, so that I can not look at social media in my bed and am forced to sleep lol.
2. Pomodoro + quick notes + lofi beats to have an easy place to jot down notes about current tasks, listen to non-distracting lofi music, and take breaks when mentally exhausted.
3. News Feed Eradicator to remove feeds from highly addictive websites (YouTube, Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, even github-who was the genius who thought github needed a feed?- etc.).
4. Ublock Origin to remove ads and I get to filter out specific elements inside a website that I don't want to see (Twitter's What's Going On for example).
5. Obsidian.md - Where I collect, organize, and link different types of knowledge and information. It is my second brain.

Software Development

6.  VSCode - For smaller projects. None of that Helix crap.

7. Jetbrains IDEs - For enterprise projects. I've found the indexing and some git selection tools to be more than worth it. I can easily familiarize myself with a new codebase and have more peace of mind when editing stuff.

8. Rix, ChatGPT and Copilot to accelerate learning, quickly go over some possible solutions for problems, set up tests, and quickly cook up prototypes. I also use it to write poems but that's a separate topic.

9. GitKraken, yeah I pay for it because I like how the GUI looks.  Judge me, I'll keep using it. I learned a ton of git by visually seeing what I'm doing in GitKraken. Now I'm not perfect at git at the terminal but I can get by. Never understood people trying to force others to only use git in the terminal, handling merge conflicts is a nightmare without an interface like GitKraken's or VSCode's.

Communication

10. Slack, I just love this tool, I get to select which times I'm willing to receive notifications, and it allows me to schedule send messages. When working asynchronously it's great knowing the message you think is important to send will be received at the time your coworkers are awake.

Extra

Vim everywhere. I use Vim on my terminal, on VSCode, on JetBrains IDEs, on Obsidian to help me write faster, and even on Google Chrome with the Vimium extension. After the initial steep learning curve, your muscle memory sets in and makes you change code faster. You legit feel like a wizard.

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