Free For All – An Open Letter of Gratitude to Developers

Dear Developers,

Thank you for your awesomeness.

No really, I meant it. I couldn’t have done any of this without you.
You have given me more than I can ever give back. So I hope that you will accept my humble gratitude for all of the long hours and late nights that you have spent making my creative life easier, more fun, and quite simply, better.

Gratefully,
Kirk

THANK YOU

I have been meaning to write this letter since April. That is about the time I started using all kinds of services on the web to build the platform for Discover The Road. But I have been so busy having creating with all of these amazing resources that the idea for writing this post was just another “get to soon” note in Evernote. (Case in point, Thank you to all of the folks at Evernote for being my digital brain.)

But the more I thought about this over the last month, I began to realize just how frictionless the creation of nearly everything has become. And just how beautiful we can all make things with a few simple tweaks.

And all of this ease is thanks to the incredible of the work of all of the developers who are spending their precious time on this earth working to make the tools that we all use everyday the most effective and yet seemingly effortless tools that the world has ever known.

And it just keeps getting better. Here is a short list of some of the services that I have been using lately. Most of these are free for me, some I pay for, but the cost is so small when you compare it to the enormous benefit that I receive.

• Evernote (As I said, my digital brain)
• WordPress (How I publish)
• Bluehost (Where it all sits)
• Trello (New to this but it has already improved my wordflow)
• Aweber (Nice responsive emails)
• Bitly (How I make the long links better looking and track them)
• Soundcloud (Love the embedding, matching the player to my site)
• Libsyn (Like my own personal radio station)
• Buffer (New to this to but wow is this easy)
• Canva (Making design uber simple)
• Filament (Makes it so easy to share from any post on my site)
• Sumome (love the simple popup with a smart sense)
• Medium (Honestly, where do I start? just beautiful work.)
• Vimeo (The best looking video and embedding tools)
• And of course the entire social web…Youtube, Twitter ,Facebook, Linkedin, Pinterest and so on….

And this list does include the programs, the apps, the people at say – Apple or Google. If I was going to make a list of all of the essential tools that I use day in and day out to feed my family, to be creative, to learn more about anything in the whole world that I am curious about in mere moments, I would be here for hours. Let me just say that I am grateful to be alive at what I consider the greatest time in history to be creating anything.
(And thank you to Aleksi Tappura via Unsplash for the photo above!)

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