Melanie Soto

We use Mindtickle for our quarterly certifications. The ability to combine quizzes, video submissions, and manager sign-offs into a single 'certification' path is excellent. It gives us confidence that our reps actually know the new messaging. Support is very proactive and helpful.

If you treat Clubhouse like a live podcast app and follow very specific clubs, it’s still valuable. I attend a weekly room with other musicians and the conversations are fantastic. The key is curating aggressively—mute most notifications and ignore the general feed. It’s not what it used to be, but in the right circles, it’s alive.

I love Photoshop's capabilities, but recent updates have been unstable. I've had crashes when using the new AI tools, and sometimes the 'Save for Web' dialog just hangs. When it works, it's brilliant. The object selection tool is almost magic. But I find myself fearful of updating whenever a new version drops because I don't want to break my workflow.

I was hesitant about online therapy, but my schedule is crazy. BetterHelp matched me with a counselor within 24 hours who actually specialized in my issues. Being able to message them in between weekly video sessions is a huge plus. It feels more continuous than traditional therapy. It's pricey, but cheaper than private practice out-of-pocket.

We run our entire partnership program through impact.com. The platform is robust, the tracking is reliable, and the reporting is top-notch. Their marketplace is great for discovering new partners, and the contract and payout automation saves our finance team a ton of time. Their support team is also very knowledgeable.

This is the best tool for teaching new developers how to use Git. It removes the fear of the command line. However, once you need to do a squash, an interactive rebase, or cherry-pick, you have to drop back to the terminal. It's a fantastic starter tool that simplifies the most common workflows.

Strapi gives me full control. I can define my content types in minutes and get a REST or GraphQL API automatically. The admin panel is clean and easy for my clients to use. Being open-source means I can host it myself on DigitalOcean for cheap, which saves my clients hundreds of dollars compared to Contentful.

Proton's free tier is a class above the rest. There's no data limit, which is unheard of. It's not as fast as the paid version and has fewer server locations, but it's secure and doesn't sell your data. It's the only free VPN I would ever recommend to family and friends. A great way to try out the service before committing.