With the recent surge in remote work, I've been in contact with a lot of testers and developers over the last couple of weeks, and have ended up sending out a list of things I use a few times. Over the years of testing many different things, working with different companies with different budget models, and doing personal projects, I've come up with a set of tools that works for me for almost all of the situations I find myself in.

One thing to note, I do like free tools, but I also like to support the developers of tools that I regularly rely on, so if I list a free tool here, I have probably bought the developer a coffee or two, paid for a support license, or made some sort of donation to them. I am not affiliated with or getting referrals or kick-backs from any of these tools.

software

• VSCodium
• espanso
• ​Greenshot
• Insomnia
• OBS Studio
• Mouse without borders
• PowerToys
• Wally
• slack
• Microsoft Teams
• WhatsApp
• Signal
• ​Foxit
• 7-Zip
• WinMerge
• GnuWin

hardware

• logitech G602
• ZSA Moonlander Mark 1
• logitech c922
• Plantronics Blackwire 725

It is always great to hear about kids learning new things and discovering new skills. I just received a note about a kid learning interested in programming, and would like to give him a shout out, Hi Dylan!

​When I was growing up I got the chance to learn some coding with my older brother. We had a Commodore VIC-20 and were able to program in the BASIC programming language. It was tedious, not documented well, and was very unfriendly to learn. Now days there are a lot of languages geared for kids learning to program. It is a great skill to have, and the nature of programming can be applied to many different life areas and problems.

Dylan wanted to share a link to some more information about programming that is specifically geared for kids.  One of those links is to the scratch language, it is a great system, and my kids have all had a go at it and had a lot of fun. Thanks Dylan! Thanks also to Barbara and the whole class at SLCCN!