Rethinking My Personal Tech Stack
Like many people, I usually take the start of a new year as an opportunity to reevaluate some choices and habits I have and see if there is room for improvement. One such area up for review is the set of services, apps, and subscriptions I use outside of work.
Much of my current computing habits can trace their origins back to the 2000’s, where Gmail marked the start of Google’s growth beyond just search and ads and smartphones began to take off. That was a very long time ago, and a lot has changed in both my own habits and the tech industry since then - so I used most of 2025 to begin researching and evaluating alternatives to what I was currently using. I placed a point on emphasis on identifying options that were cross-platform (avoiding lock in to any one operating system) and gave preference to alternatives that were open source and/or allowed me to either self host or at least keep a copy of my data synced locally, in case of account lockout. I ended up finding a lot of great options, some of which I’ve switched over to entirely.
This post will highlight some of these alternatives - I plan on making more in depth posts about each one specifically at some point in the future.