Recommendations
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I regularly recommend products and services I love directly to people asking me for suggestions or through mediums like the podcast I co-host, Tech Talk Y'all. To make it easy for people to find products I love, I put together this page, which I will try to keep updated as I find new great products or remove products if I lose my enthusiasm for them.
Travel
- Backpacks are notoriously hard to secure when you're traveling. We hunted for a better solution and found the well-made and well-designed Pacsafe bags. My personal favorite is the Pacsafe Venturesafe G3 25 Liter backpack.
- Traveling to another city and want to get great tours? My recommendation is to use the app Get Your Guide. We used this extensively in Spain and were generally happy or ecstatic with the tours. We tried another service (Viator) and were very disappointed with the experience and would recommend avoiding that app.
Financial
- If you have ever had to think about currency conversions or using an ATM in a foreign country, you need to check out the Wise card and account. You can convert currencies at the going market rate with the lowest possible fees possible. If you have a company working with multiple currencies, Wise supports businesses too to help you reduce your overhead costs.
- I think about retirement accounts as very, very long-term investment vehicles. As such, I want those accounts to be invested in very, very long-term assets. For me, the public markets are not the way to achieve this so instead I opened an account with AltoIRA and have used my account to invest in alternative assets like startups and venture capital funds. In my mind, these assets are very risky and have a minimum time horizon of ten years. If you're open to this approach, check out AltoIRA for a more affordable way to directly control and invest your retirement funds.
Apps
- I've been searching for the best bookmarking solution, and I think I've found it with Raindrop.io. Raindrop.io has launched the ability to highlight portions of a page, so when you visit that page again, those same highlights show up again. This has been invaluable for reading articles and quickly finding what I thought was important. Raindrop.io also integrates into other apps using Zapier.
Productivity
- Once I hit send on an email, I assume people will respond, but that isn't always the case. Enter FollowUpThen, a service that sends you, your email recipients, or you both a reminder to respond to an email if the service has not seen a response within a specified time. For years I've been using the free version of this service, but earlier this year, I made the plunge and upgraded to the paid version. I have zero regrets and love that it helps me follow up promptly with requests that I need responses to. In addition, I use my inbox as a task list (I know many people will cringe at this), and having regular email reminders (update firmware, request credit reports, etc.) in my inbox is the best way for me to make sure things get done.
- I have so many conversations where people share interesting nuggets about themselves or what they're doing, and I'll later meet someone I should introduce them to but I've forgotten exactly who told me that interesting nugget. Enter Dex, the personal CRM that I've been waiting for. I liked the service so much that I invested in the company as well (they did a crowdfunding round recently, but it's closed now). Dex integrates with your email and calendar (I use GSuite, but others are supported) and automatically tracks how recently you have been in touch with each person and will alert you when that time is longer than what you set for that person.