Tool reviews, productivity tips, and tech stack chat
Built mine over 8 months as budget allowed. Here's what I have and what it cost in Malaysia. The core: RM800 Used Dell OptiPlex SFF (i7-6700, 16GB RAM) from Lowyat or Shopee. These corporate surplus machines are excelle…
Built 3 MVPs in the last 2 years. Here's my database reasoning each time. MVP 1 (SaaS tool): PostgreSQL on Supabase. Best decision. Supabase gives you Postgres + auth + realtime + storage in one hosted platform. For a M…
VS Code + extensions, TablePlus for databases, Postman for APIs, OrbStack for Docker on Mac, and Fig for terminal autocomplete. All free or freemium. What would you add to the list?
Used it for 6 months. Saves me about 30min/day on boilerplate and documentation. At the USD/MYR rate it is RM45/month. If your hourly rate is above RM30, it pays for itself easily.
Notion: beautiful, shareable, slow. Obsidian: local files, Markdown, fast, great for long-term notes. I switched from Notion to Obsidian 8 months ago and never looked back.
My team uses: ChatGPT for drafting, Copilot for code, Midjourney for design concepts, Whisper for meeting transcripts. We have saved roughly 2-3 hours per person per week across the team.
From my job scanning: banks and MNCs prefer Oracle or SQL Server. Startups and tech companies split between PostgreSQL and MySQL about 60/40 in favour of Postgres now. MongoDB for document stores.
AWS: most mature ecosystem, most jobs. Azure: dominant in enterprise and GLCs (Microsoft contracts). GCP: Kubernetes and data pipelines. AWS certifications have the best ROI in the local job market.
Not many Rust roles yet. But it signals strong systems programming ability and it is growing in embedded and fintech. Learn it for the skills, not immediately for the job. Go is more immediately hireable.
Designing Data-Intensive Applications (DDIA) is the bible. Supplement with Alex Xu System Design Interview books. ByteByteGo newsletter is free and excellent. Practice on Excalidraw.
Figma won. XD is practically abandoned. Figma Dev Mode makes handoff much smoother. If you are not on Figma yet, move now, every design job posting asks for it.
Next.js + Supabase + Vercel + Stripe. Free to start, scales cheap, Stripe works in Malaysia with SST registration. Build and deploy in a weekend. Highly recommend this combo.
Webflow is great for marketing sites. Bubble for simple apps. Hiring managers do not always respect them as engineering skills. Good for solo founders and non-engineers to validate ideas quickly.
Warp terminal + Oh My Zsh + Starship prompt. On Windows: WSL2 + Windows Terminal. The difference a good terminal makes to daily productivity is underrated.
Monorepo with Turborepo or Nx for teams sharing code between frontend and backend. Separate repos for completely independent services. We moved to monorepo at 15 engineers and it helped.
Yes, non-negotiable. Nearly every serious frontend and Node role lists TypeScript now. The learning curve is 2-3 weeks. The productivity and bug-prevention payoff is immediate.
Jupyter for exploration, VS Code for production scripts, dbt for transformations, Airflow for pipelines, Power BI for stakeholder dashboards (they will not learn Python dashboards). Real world beats tutorials.
Tool threads written by people who have actually used the thing for more than a week. Comparisons like Notion versus Obsidian for personal knowledge management, project management tools that survive a real team, AI tools that genuinely save time versus those that add a review step, and which subscriptions are worth paying for out of your own pocket. Because the posts come from working professionals rather than reviewers, they tend to cover the parts that only show up later — migration pain, pricing changes, and what broke at scale.