Our favorite tools

It takes great tools to build meaningful products, here's our list:

Our Favorite Design Products

Sketch

Sketch is photoshop catered to web & mobile design. It offers a cheap price tag ($100) and great functionality. Even non-photoshop users can get up and running on sketch pretty quickly by watching online tutorials.

One really nice feature is that it has the dimensions of devices like iPhones, tablets, or desktops built in, so you don't have to go hunt that information down.

FontAwesome & Material Icons

Font awesome Material Icons are great resources for... well... icons. These are especially useful when your budget or timeline is constrained, or if your product doesn't require specialized icons. These resources offer free-to-use icons that users are typically already familiar with (a big plus when designing UX). Additionally, there are lots of great libraries to incorporate these icons into code, making developing and changing icons easier!

Coolors

Coming up with a color scheme can be hard. Coolors gives you an simple interface to cycle through colors until you find the perfect set to represent your business.

Try it out, you'll see.

Pttrns

Have you ever thought, "this is a feature in lots of other apps, I wish I could see screen shots of several so I can see what other's have done..."? Well, that is what Pttrns does, you're welcome.

Our Favorite Development Products

Sublime Text

Sublime is a phenomenal, free code editor that stays out of your way, but also provides some great features through plugins (syntax highlighting, linting, etc.) It's free with the option to pay if you like it.

React

React is a javascript library for building user interfaces. It keeps your code organized and performant. There is a lot to say about why React is great, but we'll let you google it and find other fanboys / fangirls to tell you about it.

React Native

All the benefits of React, applied to mobile apps. React Native allows you to write in javascript and run it on both android and iOS operating systems with minimal adjustments. Plus you get a lot of other nice features like "hot reloading" during development.

Redux

Redux is a predictable state container for JavaScript apps. Essentially, it helps ensure that everything in your app is in sync.

Gatsby

Gatsby is the premier static-site generator for React. It is extremely fast. Like, really fast. It can also be used as the front-end for basic web-apps.

Netlify

Netlify is a static-site host / CDN. They offer a streamlined developer experience by integrating with Github and buidling test versions of the site for pull requests and branches. Their free tier is attractive for price-constrained users.

Google Cloud Platform & Amazon Web Services

These two are each great cloud infrastructure providers. AWS has a slightly larger feature set than GCP. GCP comes in at a lower price point, typically.

Github

This probably goes without saying. Github allows you to host your code in the cloud and collaborate with other users. It even offers a desktop client for users who are not as savvy with the command line.