I've tried a lot of productivity tools over the years. Many come and go, but some have really stuck. Not because they're perfect but because they've made things just a bit easier with minimal friction. Here's a recap of what I've been using lately.
For the past two years, I've been using Arc as my browser. It's beautifully designed and built for power users. What I love most is how it stays out of your way while quietly adding features that, once you use them, you can't imagine living without. Things like vertical tabs, folder grouping, live folders that show active GitHub PRs, separate spaces for work and personal browsing, just to name a few. Features that seem simple but completely change how I work and interact with a browser.
For notes and planning, I use Notion. Again beautifully designed and great for organizing at volume. I even used Notion as a CMS solution for this website.
For meeting notes at work, Granola. It runs quietly in the background during calls and produces really clean and structured notes without minimal effort on my part. Way better than trying to type and listen at the same time.
I've also been trying out Whisper Flow for voice-to-text. It's incredibly fast and accurate. I use it for up design docs, writing emails/slack messages, and even with coding agents like Claude Code.
Which brings me to my next tool: Claude Code. If you haven't tried it yet, it's a game changer. The harness is the best out there. A word of caution for junior engineers (myself included): it's a very powerful tool. I've used it a ton to multitask, produce code quickly, and plan out richly designed features, but it can take away from your learning, especially in the formative years in school or early career when you are building mental models on core concepts, underlying systems, and new technologies. It's very easy to fall into the trap of using it to ship faster, but that often comes at the cost of losing a deeper understanding of how the system actually works. Consider using it in learning or plan mode, as a pair programmer/coding buddy to ask questions, not as a replacement for yourself in the coding or full planning process.
My editor of choice is VS Code, I've used it for years. At the end of the day, use whatever you're most comfortable with, it really doesn't matter. Some people really nerd out about their editor, and use tools like Vim, which is great. I actually use the Vim extension in VS Code myself. It takes some getting used to, but once it clicks, it makes you really productive.
While I was prepping for interviews during college I used and tested basically all of the free resources out there. Some of my favorites include: InterviewGuide.dev, a good place to start if you're not sure how to structure your prep. There's also a free version of Cracking the Coding Interview here, a classic, and still very relevant book. Neetcode 150, just do it. And Pramp is great for mock interviews.
I use Figma for design work. It's pretty easy to use and free for students. When I need visual inspiration, I doom scroll through Dribbble.
I recommend checking a few of these out. Feel free to message me as well if you have any recommendations, love trying new things out.