tool-review
pip is slow. virtualenv is clunky. pyenv is fragile. pipx is fine until it isn't. uv replaces all four with a single Rust binary that installs packages in milliseconds instead of seconds. That's not marketing copy. I timed it. What uv Replaces Before uv, a Python
tool-review
WordPress powers 43% of the web. That number gets cited in every CMS comparison as if popularity were a recommendation. It's not. Popularity is inertia. And for a solo builder choosing a publishing platform in 2026, inertia is the enemy of a clean stack. Ghost handles blogging, newsletters,
tool-review
Most people describe tmux as a way to split your terminal into panes. That undersells it by about 90%. tmux is a session manager, a process supervisor, and a deployment tool disguised as a terminal multiplexer. If you run anything in a terminal that needs to survive closing your laptop
tool-review
Every macOS machine ships with a task scheduler more capable than cron. It restarts failed jobs, fires missed schedules after sleep, handles stdout logging natively, and doesn't require memorizing five-field time syntax. It's called launchd, and almost nobody outside Apple's own engineering teams uses
tool-review
I used to run Spotlight for search, Rectangle for window management, Flycut for clipboard history, TextExpander for snippets, and a handful of Automator workflows for scripts. Raycast replaced all five. It's free. That's not a marketing claim. I uninstalled four apps in the same week I
tool-review
Most solo builder stacks have four or five databases pretending to be necessary. PostgreSQL for relational data, Redis for caching and queues, Elasticsearch for search, Pinecone for embeddings, maybe RabbitMQ for pub/sub. That's five processes to monitor, five sets of credentials, five things that can fail at
tool-review
Cursor wraps AI around your editor. Claude Code wraps your editor around AI. That distinction sounds like semantics until you use both for a month and realize they produce different kinds of work. I've been running both since late 2025. Cursor for frontend projects where I'm
tool-review
ffmpeg does the work of five SaaS subscriptions from a single command line. Video compression, audio extraction, thumbnail generation, format conversion, batch processing. If you're creating any kind of content as a solo builder and you're not using it, you're either overpaying for tools
tool-review
pip is slow. virtualenv is clunky. pyenv is fragile. pipx is fine until it isn't. uv replaces all four with a single Rust binary that installs packages in milliseconds instead of seconds. That's not marketing copy. I timed it. What uv Replaces Before uv, a Python
tool-review
Nginx makes you configure SSL yourself. Caddy does it automatically, for every domain, with zero lines of certificate configuration. That difference sounds small until you've spent an afternoon debugging expired certs at 2 AM. If you're self-hosting anything on your own hardware, Caddy is the web
tool-review
Every macOS machine ships with a task scheduler more capable than cron. It restarts failed jobs, fires missed schedules after sleep, handles stdout logging natively, and doesn't require memorizing five-field time syntax. It's called launchd, and almost nobody outside Apple's own engineering teams uses
tool-review
Cursor wraps AI around your editor. Claude Code wraps your editor around AI. That distinction sounds like semantics until you use both for a month and realize they produce different kinds of work. I've been running both since late 2025. Cursor for frontend projects where I'm