Like any engineer, I think a lot about the tools I use to do my work. Here's where I geek out about them.
thinking
Lots of my work is thinking. The first thing to do is get things out of my head and onto something else. Almost anything works; I use a combination of lightweight todo lists on steno pads, in Notion—whatever's nearby that I'm going to look at. For long form writing and notes, I use a ringed notebook with good paper and a good pen.
A lot of my work is in front of, and with, a computer, and I find myself replicating paper tooling there. I've unfortunately become skilled at notion databases, and those are useful as stores of structured documents. I keep a daily journal along with a weekly agenda of what I plan to accomplish, with regular check-ins. All of this goes in Notion.
Most of the value in writing-as-thinking is from intentionality. The act of putting it down somewhere reinforces the thinking, which makes it more likely I'll do it. Re-reading the words also helps. Exactly where the things are written matters less to me than writing them down.
programming
I still like to write into a text editor and then ask computers to do things.
I'm a long time vim user (for over 20 years). Before that, I used XEmacs (may it rest in peace). I have fully gotten on board the neovim train, even going so far as converting to a terminal-based workflow, which I've long been hesitant to do.
I prefer statically-typed languages over dynamically-typed languages.