Software I love.

My favourite software that I would recommend.

Development tools

  • Cursor

    A PyCharm girl for many years I have recently switched to Cursor. Got to see what all this AI fuss is about.

  • iTerm2

    I’ve just used it for too long. May try out Ghostty soon.

  • QuPath (special mention)

    If you are working with histology images (or frankly any pyramidal image type) then QuPath is unmatched, free software for image inspection and analysis.

Design

  • Adobe Illustrator

    I tried free alternatives like Inkscape but nothing beat Illustrator, which is a shame because I don’t like recommending Adobe! The freedom and expressivity for scientific figure creation was key to explaining biological concepts and the results across them. People are just biased by prettier and more professional looking things.

Productivity

  • Raycast

    Is there anything it can’t do? Replaced Alfred (and a bunch of other programs like magnet for me). Strongly recommend.

  • Things3

    Things3 changed my life. I’m not exaggerating. It was the digital alternative to a physical bullet journal that I’d been looking for. Low friction enough to keep using, powerful enough to be useful. I wrote my thesis in under 2 months thanks to Things3 (post about this coming soon!)

  • Notion

    Who hasn’t used Notion at this point? My PhD project lived in Notion and good recording and writing habits made writing the thesis (and collaborating and passing the torch) a lot easier. I recently discovered that I don’t like it for ad hoc note taking.

  • Obsidian

    That’s where Obsidian comes in. I have thousands of Apple Notes that I haven’t explored to the fullest or that are lost in between shopping lists. Obsidian has been a great way to reflect and combine related thoughts. I am new to this but I’ve been loving it so far. Most of my blog posts will start as Obsidian notes it seems! Also, graphs are pretty.

Life

  • Daylio

    I’ve tried a few journalling tools and couldn’t get one to stick. Turns out I don’t need to record everything to still get actionable insights I care about. Recording everything is a chore. That’s why Daylio is the perfect supplement to Obsidian. A fun and easy way to track the trends I care about while Obsidian takes care of interesting reflections. Looking forward to getting more data to analyse from this. My favourite trend so far is that soreness correlates with better mood for that day and the day after. 💪

  • Headspace

    It took me far too long to get into meditation. I simply wasn’t open to it. I loved my chattering inner voice. But that voice isn’t always helpful and that voice isn’t all you are. Once I realised this meditation became a powerful tool for steadying and readying the mind.