You’ll be surprise to hear that that are a lot of free software tools you’re not taking advantage because they seem “too technical” but are actually tools that anyone (without coding knowledge) can use.
These app can save you time and money because all the apps I’m sharing can be used for free.
And everyone can use them to make a tedious process easier or replace existing paid apps.
I use these tools almost every day.
This list is not exclusive to tools that engineers use for work, it includes apps that I’ve found through my research in engineering circles. I mainly prefer these tools because you can get a lot of functionality from them in the free version.
You have too many subscriptions
You might be paying $50 every month, or even $100s of dollars every month on subscriptions to do things that you can get for free. All that’s required is a little bit of googling. Or just by asking Gemini directly on Google or ChatGPT.
Especially now with AI, you can even build your own tools to accomplish the simple tasks and forgo the subscription you’re paying. You can check out my [post that talks about building a simple app with AI].
As a side note: I was recently paid by a real estate investor to build an AI workflow that helps him find property owners who want to sell their house. The criteria that the AI looked for were house due to pending foreclosure, on a probate list, etc.
The AI will open up a browser, navigate through the webpage it’s given, collect the information and output a formatted CSV file with all the results.
All I used was a subscription to Anthropic’s Claude and VS Code to build the workflow. It turned what would take you 8 hours to do into a 30 minute task run by AI.
So it’ll technically only take you 5 minutes to get the results because all you’d have to do is describe to the AI what you want.
There are also a lot of things I’ve learned from engineering folks in college, and while working as an engineer afterwards.
Throughout this journey, I’ve picked up on a lot of resources that anyone can consider adopting for their own benefit. I will share some of these tools below.
Password Manager: Bitwarden
This is a password management app will save you a ton of time on trying to find passwords to your accounts.
You’ll only need to remember ONE master password, but it’ll let you generate and set complex 15 character passwords (with symbols and numbers) that are unique for each of your accounts.
Before you start worrying about security, I can say that I personally think it’s improved my accounts security by 100%.
- The first reason using this is more secure is because each of your accounts will have different passwords that are complex and hard to hack. Simple passwords that are used on multiple accounts are one of the top reasons why people get hacked.
- The second reason is because you won’t be writing down your passwords anywhere for someone to find. Gaining access to your password is another easy way you’ll get hacked. Having your all your passwords in a password-locked safe like Bitwarden will decrease the likelihood someone will find your passwords.
- The third reason is because you will only attempt to log into websites that are legitimate. Bitwarden will indicate which websites you have an account with so that when you’re on a fake phishing website you’ll realize that someone is trying to scam you because you won’t have an account at that URL address. One of the most common ways scammers try to get access to your account is by sending you and email that links to a fake website that look like the real thing to get you to enter you username and password so that they can steal that information to gain access to your real account. Having Bitwarden will make you aware that you’re on a fake website and you won’t enter in your information.
If you don’t have a password manager already I highly recommend Bitwarden. The personal account is free and I’ve been using it for over 5 years now. I recently shared it with my friend and helped her create an account. It has blown her mind how easy it is to keep track and find the password to her accounts.
Notes Editor: Obsidian
Obsidian is an overpowered text editor. And you must try it out!
I’m writing my this blog post on Obsidian right now.
I’m doing all of my writing on Obsidian nowadays I’m using it to journal, plan my work, write blogs, and keep track of my goals.
Words can’t describe how useful it is. The main thing to note is: it lets you easily connect your thoughts and improve the thinking process by linking note pages seamlessly (if you think through writing and if you don’t, you really have to consider).
If you do any sort of writing at all, such as creative writing, writing a book, keeping a journal, or need a place to type a plan for your next project, I’d highly recommend doing it on Obsidian.
How it works is that you designate a folder to be your “Vault” and you create markdown files that will be your notes.
And these simple markdown files can be tagged, linked to each other and moved around with just a couple of keystrokes through Obsidian’s interface.
I even use it to pull in my Kindle notes to reference and take action on when I’m reading business books.
You can use it to store your recipes and easily find them or link them with related recipes so that the you can create a dinner menu. The world is your oyster with this text editor!
You can also create templates that you just insert or duplicate. Have you had to write the documents that have a very similar format? Well, you can define templates here and just create a copy of the template for your next piece of writing. Just like I’m doing with my blog posts.
Project Management: Notion
Notion is great for it’s databases which are basically aesthetic spreadsheets with limited formula capabilities.
BUT! The navigation is so much better with Notion. I can actually find what I’m looking for.
One very useful way I use Notion is to track my reminders (to keep track of recurring tasks and responsibilities I have to remember).
So I’ve actually created a directory for my Google Drive and my Canva Projects because I don’t know about you but I spend half my time looking for the file I need in both these apps. Their tools are great (I use Google Sheets all the time but it takes me forever to remember which folders they’re in) but I don’t think they spent much time on file organization.
Notion’s calendar app is a HUGE upgrade from Google Calendar. I use google calendar and I feel this viscerally. At one point I was considering building my own calendar app because of the limitations I encountered while using Google Calendar but then I found Notion calendar. It gave me everything I ever want a calendar app to do.
I’ve created databases where I add a new page every day to track the habits I’m trying to build by adding the hours I spent doing the activity, and also health metrics like my weight and whether I ate enough fiber or protein.
I’ve tried a few different habit trackers and I can say that Notion has all the functionality that you need to help you build habits. Don’t pay for a habit tracking app!
Version Control: GitHub
GitHub is a file management tool that could be compared with Google Drive but not quite.
It was created as a solution for engineers to keep track of changes to their codebase.
And most people store code files on GitHub, but it’s also a great place to store any simple basic files like CSV, markdown, txt, and other text files.
If you need to track the change over time of a particular file, you want to consider GitHub.
For example, if you’re a poet and you make changes to your poems over time, instead of writing on another page and losing the original poem, you can track it’s change overtime by using GitHub. You also don’t have to worry about your changes overwriting your previous version because each version will be saved.
I definitely use it mainly for code but I found that it’s also a great resource to sync files such as the markdown files in this Obsidian vault. You have to explicitly save to GitHub and explicitly sync files from GitHub to your local files on another device but it fully ensures that there are no conflicts and/or overwrites that gets missed.
