During the pandemic, I’ve been fine-tuning my personal technology stack the whole time. My personal attitude about apps is that the application work for me, I don’t work for the application. So while I’m the first person to experiment with a new application, it needs to be easy to use.

Here’s how my current pandemic tech stack looks:

• Slack — I use it like so many other folks —- at my day job, to see what I can learn from The DevOps Institute, and learn more about content marketing from Superpath. My next step is to stop being such a lurker in both groups.
• Google Workspace is the standard at my day job, and I also use it for writing my opensource.com articles. The Google Workspace Marketplace offers some nice add-ons such as ProWritingAid, Better Word Count, and Table of contents which all play a role in my composing process when I’m writing with Google Docs.
• Basecamp is where I stay organized on personal projects such as my last job hunt. I’m using the free version and like it very much. Basecamp would be on the top of my list if I ever choose a collaboration platform in the future. 
• LucidChart is now my standard diagramming tool after using Microsoft Visio and OmniGraffle for years during my previous career as a technical writer. It’s SaaS-based and I can’t recommend it enough.
• Microsoft Office and Word, in particular, are still my choice for writing most articles and long-form content outside my day job. The Grammarly integration with Word is maturing. It feels weird to work in a place that doesn’t use Microsoft Office, but I still count the venerable Office suite as a critical element of my tech stack.
• Otter.ai — a recording and transcription service — helps me record and transcribe interviews. I’m still on the free version, and even that transcription beats my poor handwriting.
• LinkedIn because I use it to keep up on technology trends and keep in contact with some of my industry contacts. Dare I say that I’ve also been watching my fair share of LinkedIn Learning videos about content marketing, collaboration, and some technical topics.

So what’s in your COVID-19 tech stack?