mermaid.js - Excellent tool for creating architecture (and other) diagrams from text. Add to a markdown file with special syntax. Renders in GitHub natively. Has some bugs, but team seems to have a good head on its shoulders and should hopefully work them out soon. 8/10

VSCode - One of the few things Microsoft hasn't totally screwed up yet. Plug-in ecosystem is enormous. 9/10

Vim - At the other end of the spectrum. I forced myself to learn keybindings last year and now I can't not use them. I find myself unable to use text editors that lack a "vim mode". 2dWi" - fixed that missing quote! I find the extension ecosystem a bit puzzling still - extensions I install never seem to work quite right. Having to memorize extra keybindings for each plugin maxes out my mental load. 8/10

DigitalOcean - A breath of fresh air compared to AWS. There are fewer services and quite a lot of abstraction, but I'm happy to pay for higher reliability than something I can self-host. Encountered some bizarre behavior/bugs at times, but DO support has been super prompt and helpful (even on the free support tier). If you need three+ 9's of reliability call AWS or GCP. For everything else there's DigitalOcean. 9/10

Django - The first time I've enjoyed web development in quite some time. The abstraction level can get a bit silly at times, but I find that it's easy to peel back the layers of the onion, so to speak, and troubleshoot the inner workings. I really, really wish that a strongly-typed version of Python could be used. `mypy` and `typeddjango/django-stubs` just don't cut it. I want more compile time errors! 8/10

Logic Pro - Technically started using it in late 2021 but really got more into it this year. Used to produce music for a group of friends that play together. Tons of keybindings. Interface can get confusing, but it's a powerful tool. 9/10