It’s time for my annual reflection on the tools that we use to power Silverpine. I’ve been posting these for the past few years and it’s always an interesting activity to see how things change over time. You can see old posts here:
Overall, we have continued to consolidate our tools, which is good from a financial perspective. One notable tool that fell from the list this year is Squarespace which we previously used to host the Silverpine website; we rewrote our website as a native front end hosted on AWS which allowed us to drop it from our monthly costs.
While tool consolidation feels good, I do worry that it can potentially lead to a lack of innovation. For the past few years, a lot of change has occurred in the design space (Sketch, Figma, InDesign, etc) and it felt like there were a lot of improvements being made amidst healthy competition. But this past year, that has slowed way down. Even amongst teleconferencing software it feels like things have mostly collapsed to a primary three options. I sincerely hope that 2024 will bring with it some overdue disruption into the tools ecosystem. I am definitely ready to try something new!
Communication
Slack – If we could pick only one tool from this list, it would be Slack. For any distributed team, Slack is absolutely essential. One thing that I did notice that changed this year is that our team took advantage of Slack’s “Huddle” feature far more than in years past. We pay for Zoom as well, but it’s much easier for team members to quickly jump into an adhoc call and do some screen sharing if they don’t have to leave Slack. Definitely a much used feature.
Zoom – There are three main options for teleconferencing (Google Meets, Zoom and Microsoft Teams) and while none of them are perfect, Zoom still seems to work better across various hardware configurations than the others.
Google Workspace – Google Workspace replaced Dropbox for our team last year and for the most part it hasn’t impacted us much. It’s a fairly economical option for email and shared storage and while the shared storage functions aren’t as robust as Dropbox, it works well enough.
Development and Design
Figma – Last year we moved fully to Figma (as did most of the industry) and it’s been great. I’m feeling relieved that the Adobe acquisition/merger fell through because Figma is one of those pieces of software that almost feels magical, and I was worried that Adobe would kill that feeling. Everyone from designers to developers to clients (viewing prototypes) extolls how simple and accessible it is. It’s just a fantastic tool.
Github – There’s not a whole lot to say about Github. After Microsoft purchase it, they’ve mostly left them alone to flourish. We use it for the obvious code repository features, but we also use Github Actions for our CI (continuous integration) tooling.
Tower – We moved to a team subscription for Tower a few years ago and haven’t looked back. Their level of support and continued feature improvement have made it the de facto GUI for source control. Our team works on a myriad of platforms and Tower is well supported on all of them.
Jira – If you use Jira, you know why you use it, and you’ll probably agree that it’s “fine”. That’s really all I want to say about it. Nobody loves Jira, myself included.
Operations
Quickbooks – Is there even another option for keeping your books that isn’t some sort of Oracle installation? Quickbooks works well for what we need. The CPA and bookkeeper are glad we use it. I guess that means something.
Harvest – We use Harvest for invoicing clients and a small amount of time-tracking. We’ve been pretty happy with it. The reporting tools make it easy to understand cashflow and to understand when invoices are late.
Gusto – If you need to pay employees or contractors, Gusto is fantastic. One small change from last year is that we upgraded to Gusto Plus and it has made a huge improvement in their customer support. We have employees in multiple states that all have unique tax and reporting requirements so moving to Plus has been invaluable. It’s more expensive than the base plan but definitely worth it in terms of reducing headaches.
Adobe Acrobat Pro – We actually have been using Acrobat Pro for years; I simply missed including it in past years. As an agency with numerous clients and prospects, we are frequently dealing with NDAs, MSAs, SOWs and various other legal documents. Acrobat lets us easily deal with whatever form we receive and sign/counter-sign them. This is one of those tools that “just works.”
Jonathan Hays 