Yenna Gaasbeek

I'm a backend developer with terrible design skills. Tailwind UI lets me copy-paste beautiful, accessible, responsive components and build a professional-looking dashboard in hours. The code is clean and easy to customize because it's just Tailwind classes. It's the best investment I've made for my freelance business.

When it works, Cursor feels magical. But I’ve also hit several weird bugs—stuck AI requests, context not updating after big git pulls, and occasional freezes. It’s clearly evolving fast. I still keep VS Code installed for emergencies. Early adopters will love it, but conservative teams might want to wait another release cycle.

For managing my own schedule, it's a 10/10. For team scheduling, it's a bit more complex. The 'Smart 1:1s' feature is great for finding time with my direct reports. But coordinating a meeting across multiple busy teams can still be a challenge. The AI is powerful, but not magic.

LangChain provides all the building blocks you need to go beyond simple prompt-and-response. Document loaders, text splitters, vector store integrations—it's all there. It has a steep learning curve and the documentation can be a bit chaotic, but you can build complex agents and RAG pipelines much faster with it.

Algolia is hands down the best search-as-a-service out there. The dashboard analytics let us see exactly what users are searching for (and getting 'no results' for), which is gold for inventory planning. My only gripe is the pricing—once you hit millions of records, the monthly bill jumps significantly. Great for growth, painful for scale.

Be very careful of the 'Apply All' button on Google's recommendations. They are designed to make you spend more money, not improve your ROI. They'll suggest broad match keywords and automated bidding strategies that burn through your budget in hours. It feels like the fox is guarding the henhouse.

If you need a high-performance public-facing site, Next.js is the way to go. The image component alone improves Core Web Vitals significantly. We migrated our e-commerce site to Next.js and saw a 40% jump in lighthouse scores. The developer experience is top-notch once you learn the patterns.

I run a consultancy and Calendly has been a game-changer. Clients book their own slots, and it syncs perfectly with my Outlook and Google calendars. The automated reminders have cut my no-show rate to almost zero. I was hesitant to pay for the professional plan, but the 'workflows' feature that sends follow-up emails automatically is worth every penny.