Shadowing Practice: Tools I use to make MY APPS - Learn English Speaking with Video

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As a solo developer, you're not just an engineer, you also wear a ton of other hats.

You're the marketer, the analyst, the content guy, you're basically doing everything.

And the only reason that's possible is because of great tools.

And in this video, I will share exactly all the tools

that I use on a daily basis to run my own business.

That means we're talking actually about four different categories.

We're talking about tools to build it, to grow it, to run it, and to speak about it.

If you're also a developer working on your own apps,

then you should stick around until the end because that are the sections that most developers actually ignore.

And there's one thing I included that I actually didn't expect to appear in my list.

So give the video a like, stay subscribed and then let's dive into the first category.

So the first category is tools I use to build my apps in the software.

And the first thing is of course my IDE

and I've been using Cursor for pretty much a couple of years at this point.

I switched from VS Code to Cursor because at that point Cursor just had a better integration of AI.

Probably at this point VS Code is somewhat on a similar level

but I just like to stick to the tools

and within Cursor I really like that pretty much every week they're pumping out updates.

Of course the whole code completion stuff is working great in cursor

but the agents and the agent views is really a nice addition here

so i can manage my agents here i can start a new agent um there are

so many more features that i probably don't even use of cursor

but of course under the hood it is a vs code fork

and it just works great so i really love to see this view here in cursor

and it just helps me to build my apps faster on top of that I also use Cloud Code.

And I mostly use

Cloud Code, by the way, in Cursor.

So I'm pretty sure that many of you are screaming, oh Simon, why do you manage multiple subscriptions?

You should just use this or you should use that.

You know what?

Every other week someone is saying that either

Cloud, Codex or something else is the best in town.

And if I just have a subscription to anything, I can just swap them and use what's best at a time.

No, seriously.

This kind of falls into the same category

that I'm too too lazy to cancel something

but uh cloud code starting from December 2025 was my go -to coding tool

because at that point

when it came on it was just the absolute best for implementing stuff now I'm now switching sometimes between cloud

if I hit the mix uh sometimes I go to cursor here to the agents

which will do some nice planning and just gives also a nice UI

and sometimes I also of course go to the good old Codex application

because chat GPT and someone says oh Codex is now the best thing on earth

and then Simon jumps into this and tries to use Codex

but to be honest Codex is pretty cool

but it's not my main thing

I still haven't gotten used to like this whole like entire agentic coding

I still like to see the code here every now

and then because

that makes me still feel like a developer i guess um anyway on top of these

so on top of clot on top of uh cursor

and the agents

and codex i of course heavily also rely on chat gpt um

i i kind of like i guess all of this is somewhat like um some people will hate on this and say,

Simon, why are you still using this?

This is so 2024 or so.

But I came to really like ChatGPT and it's just like working for me really good.

So I don't see a big problem.

It has the whole memory of what I'm doing.

So I really like to chat with it, whether I'm using my phone, whether I'm using the chat application here on the Mac,

it kind of knows my whole life.

I definitely try to use Claude and Cowork here a bit more, But yeah, if you're like your whole life is in one application,

it's quite hard to change to something else at that point.

Now, I use ChatGPT to talk about,

for example, the features I want to implement in the game or the general direction I want to take that game in.

Then I go into cursor or codex to fix bugs, implement, make plans, do all that stuff.

And I also, of course, use Gemini to then generate art in my game.

Here's an example I had where I created this image for,

I don't know, like a promotional image and then I wanted to have a different kind of image here.

I do like what Gemini is putting out, I just don't like that I never get like a transparent background.

So it's always a bit of pain in the backside to get the images converted.

But overall, that is pretty much my flow.

I sometimes also still use my own image generation tool.

If you want to learn more about that,

let me know in the comments and I will do a dedicated video on that and how it's using the OpenAI API.

To wrap up the section of how I build my stuff, I want to point to four other things.

So one of them is I actually also by now, yes, I'm learns with time.

Also, I'm using a bunch of skills, especially the Grill Me and Grill With Dogs from Madpokok is amazing skill,

but I also try to use every other possible skill.

So if Sentry has a skill, if InstantDB has a skill, I definitely install those and use them.

Same for here, the Gesture Handler Migration, the Expo Migration.

So you want to make sense and use the skills that you need.

I tried to add like 50 different skills and then I never came to use them.

So pick the ones that you really use.

And then just to wrap it up, just a quick shout out to a couple of tools.

I use Hyper as my terminal, but honestly, I'm not doing very much in my terminal these days.

I'm honestly still old school.

So while there is like a div tree here in cursor,

I kind of like to use an external tool and I like to use source tree for that.

It just gives me a nice staging area in which I can check what AI has changed all the files.

It changed once again.

And I don't know.

I just like this view really.

And finally, for API testing, I currently use something called Yuck.

I don't know why, but this was like a super easy tool by, I think, I guess, another indie hacker.

So if you want to support a small company and not use Postman or one of those stock tools, give Jack a try.

I found this surprisingly great.

In the second category are a couple of tools that I use personally every day.

And the first is actually Todoist.

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I have a mixed relationship with Todoist.

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For a while, it was my main thing for managing my week and everything then I kind of dropped it entirely.

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Now, I kind of really like Todoist and the Todoist application, so I keep it more for like general weekly repeating tasks

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and kind of more personal things that I just want to like remember.

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Beyond Todoist, I also love to use Raycast.

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Now, out of Raycast, you can probably get a whole lot more than I do.

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I primarily use this to like start any kind of application

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and especially I love the snippet functionality

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so with the snippet functionality I can just go pretty much anywhere let's say I go here to this chat

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and then I say tiny harvest I don't know what the shortcut was link tiny harvest

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and it just replaces something to this

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and I have this for a couple of things

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that I often use um again there's so much more to Raycast

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that I'm probably not using but this is one of the really cool features

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and yes i know there may be other apps for mac

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and other platforms but i just like them okay besides raycast

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and to do is bear has become

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or is it beer no beer is what you drink

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this is bear this has become my go -to like note -taking

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and everything in my life

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so some people use obsidian some people use what was the with the end i don't even know

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because i i don't care i tried different and others like notion

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and they just never fit my use case this one works perfectly

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it is based on text

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i have found my own like weekly thing how i um go into like link different elements

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if you're interested in how i use bear and with the text

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and how i manage everything here to make my reviews to make my planning let me know in the comments

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i'm happy to dive deeper into this because i really think for mac users

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and i always use us in general bear is a perfect application

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it works amazing on your phones it syncs everywhere it looks good

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if you type something it is really easy um you can like do something in bold uh

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so it respects markdown stuff it is really my favorite tool

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i've been using this now since 2021 it looks like

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because i'm using like a weekly bullet journal uh kind of thing

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and so this is really the backbone of how i run pretty much everything now besides

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that as you've seen i also of course use slack

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i don't use it heavily anymore i use use it to communicate with my video editor

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or some outside people and lately I've been using a lot more discord as well especially to manage the tiny harvest community.

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I'm also in a couple of other groups but I'm not that active.

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I was never a huge fan of discord.

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I found it kind of confusing but to manage this community it is really still one of the best tools out there.

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When it comes to growing my app I rely just on a handful of tools because I'm really not a numbers guy.

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So the first thing i definitely use is revenue cad

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i pretty much check revenue cad a couple of times per

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day especially the mobile application to see like my revenue the latest purchases

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if anything is going good um i'm very open with this i've also posted my public page to this before

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so you can see my revenue here doing quite well with tiny harvest now the second thing i use is

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actually post hoc but i'm not really using this too hard

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so as i said i'm not really a numbers guy

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and i always hated this in the past i know

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i should be a lot more concerned about like conversion path

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and percentages but i just don't like it you know that's my biggest problem

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so i use the analytics from post hoc

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and i think they're really great you can make a lot of sense out of this

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and i tried to have like different paths here in the past to check out the conversions

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but they never really made meaningful progress on that.

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PostHoc now also has some AI analytics so they can like create your dashboards and you can just chat with your data.

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That is a lot more what I like

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but I definitely need to dive more into this to make meaningful decisions about my projects.

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Now besides RevenueCAD and PostHoc I definitely also rely heavily on Sentry to like monitor my application see

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if the cron jobs are good are any critical errors coming in i watch session replays

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i use sentry for pretty much everything in my application

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that's also the reason why i love to work with them as a sponsor in many of the other videos

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that you've seen on this channel now the last tool

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that i use to grow my apps

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and monitor them is actually something you would probably not expect and

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that is the analytics in app store connect

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they have become a lot better over the last like a couple of months

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I think there was one big change that made the analytics

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so much better you can get so many good information

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so many graphs here to see where your app is going

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you can see why your app was downloaded was it features like lately

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I had this little app store browse push which resulted in like four

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or five x download numbers of my application

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you can see the app store search you can see everything you can see like the sales

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and the proceeds and pretty much everything

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so the analytics in app store connect are definitely uh like a hidden gem at this point

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so for everyone who does have ios applications check out the analytics here they can be really meaningful

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and helpful in understanding the uh patterns of your application also of course

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if your app store optimization is working and pretty much everything

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that is important about your ios app finally i want to mention some tools

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that i use as a content creator and i know this doesn't mean that every developer needs these tools,

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but if you're running your business alone building SaaS apps or mobile apps, you might benefit from using a couple of these tools.

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The first that I've been using throughout all of the years is ScreenFlow.

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I use ScreenFlow to record my screen and my camera at the same time and I use some general editing,

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cut -out stuff here or add call -outs or anything easy in terms of transitions that I wanted to generally apply.

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If I want to do more video editing, I still go into Final Cut Pro.

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On a Mac, this is just one of the best tools to edit your videos and yep,

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this is how it looks like to edit a video.

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I'm definitely not really good at editing this kind of videos and although I really enjoy doing this every now and then,

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I often also have an editor to help me out with my videos simply because, well,

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video editing is not really my main thing i can do it okayish

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and i sometimes do it but uh overall other people are just a lot better at

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that but what i use i definitely fall back to final cut pro

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now other tools in the creation category one of them is

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recut recut is i don't know by another indie maker i think

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and it's really good at just

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you see cutting out these areas where you're not speaking

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it's doing this really super great you can just like hit save export

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and then you have video without all of the breaks here.

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I don't use it that often, primarily because I just keep talking most of the time.

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But I've used this a couple of times as well in the past.

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If you want to do any kind of short videos, I use CapCut.

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It is a paid tool.

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I think you can use it for free a bit.

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But if you want to get serious and build shorts for YouTube,

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TikTok, Instagram, anything like that cap cut makes it really easy to like add stuff have some text animations generated

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so you can do like a short in 30 minutes or

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so but um since i've given up on shorts lately i currently don't have a pro subscription

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but highly recommend cap cut and maybe there are also other editing tools

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but this one really worked well for me in the past

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and then finally for my social scheduling i currently use typefully

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now there are probably like hundreds of different tools to schedule posts on X

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and LinkedIn and Instagram

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and maybe this is like the worst of them

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I don't know maybe it is the best maybe it's somewhere in the middle the thing is

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if you pick a tool

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and you know how it works

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you kind of just stick with it the same as for my note application yeah maybe obsidian is better

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and making it work with Claude and AI and or notion even better but

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Once you have a system that works for you and typefoli works fine for me, absolutely, I absolutely hate to switch to a different tool.

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So currently, this is my tool of choice for scheduling any kind of social content across X, LinkedIn or sometimes even Blue Sky.

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Alright, that's it for the list of the tools that I use on a daily basis to run my business,

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to build apps, to talk about them and to hopefully also grow it.

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But honestly, it's not only about these specific tools.

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Of course, I love them, but these tools are pretty much a personal choice that I've built up over the years.

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And it doesn't really matter which kind of to -do application or node application you use.

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They're probably like 10 really good contenders.

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But the thing is that for all these categories, you want to have a decent app in place if you're a solo developer,

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because that will really help you to stay sane.

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This list would have looked very different a year ago, because all of the AI tools came into the list.

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But still, there are some tools that I just don't want to replace because it just hurts to change my note application

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So I stick to what's working for me

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And I'm actually working on a new application that rips out part of my weekly flow into its own app

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So stay subscribed to learn more about that app very soon

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No, I don't want to change my tools, but I absolutely love to learn more about your tools

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So let me know in the comments.

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What is one tool?

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You definitely open up every single day and probably don't use your ide

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because you're in developer and you will always open your ide

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But let me know what is the one cool tool

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that you use on a daily basis that I definitely have to check out as well.

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And if it's something I didn't expect, I might actually make a video on a new tool.

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So let me know in the comments.

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I read every comment.

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Check out galaxies .dev if you want to build your own

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React Native applications.

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And I'll catch you in the next one.

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So until then, happy coding.

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Simon.

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157 sentences

Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This speaking lesson is built on the video “Tools I use to make MY APPS”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: tool, app, application. This video has 249 sentences and 3198 words to shadow. The speech runs for 16:37. The speaker talks fast, about 192 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 82% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
skill noun	/skɪl/	A capacity to do something well; a technique, an ability, usually acquired or learned, as opposed to abilities that are regarded as innate.
edit verb	/ˈɛdɪt/	To change a text, or a document.
developer noun	/dɪˈvɛləpɚ/	A person or entity engaged in the creation or improvement of certain classes of products.
analytics noun	/ˌæn.əˈlɪt.ɪks/	The principles governing any of various forms of analysis.
cloud noun	/ˈklaʊ̯d/	A visible mass of water droplets suspended in the air.
harvest noun	/ˈhɑɹ.vəst/	The process of gathering the ripened crop; harvesting.
lately adverb	/ˈleɪt.li/	Recently; not long ago; of late; not long since.
rely verb	/ɹɪˈlaɪ/	To trust; to have confidence in; to depend.
implement verb	/ˈɪmpləmənt/	To bring about; to put into practice; to carry out.
meaningful adjective	/ˈmiː.nɪŋ.fl̩/	Having meaning, significant.
dive verb	/daɪv/	To swim under water.
subscription noun	/səbˈskɹɪpʃən/	Access to a resource for a period of time, generally for payment.
primarily adverb	/ˈpɹaɪ.mə.ɹə.li/	Of a primary or central nature, first and foremost.
connect verb	/kəˈnɛkt/	To join (to another object): to attach, or to be intended to attach or capable of attaching, to another object.
monitor noun	/ˈmɑ.nɪ.tɚ/	Someone who watches over something; a person in charge of something or someone.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Meaning
check out verb	To record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.).
cut out verb	To refrain from (doing something, using something etc.), to stop or cease (doing something).
open up verb	To open.
put out verb	To blind (eyes).
rip out verb	To remove by ripping
stick around verb	To stay; to linger; to remain.
wrap up verb	To cover or enclose (something) by folding and securing a covering entirely around it.

Sentences worth repeating

Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:

That means we're talking actually about four different categories.
Simon, why are you still using this?
It has the whole memory of what I'm doing.
I'm honestly still old school.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on	I've been using
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	haven't gotten · has changed · has become
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	is based · was downloaded

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 70 contractions and reduced forms, such as I'm, don't, you're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “sh” and “zh” sounds: subscription /səbˈskɹɪpʃən/, conversion /kənˈvɝʒən/, notion /ˈnoʊʃən/, transition /tɹænˈzɪʃ.ən/, completion /kəmˈpliː.ʃən/
Long words — get the stress right: developer /dɪˈvɛləpɚ/, analytics /ˌæn.əˈlɪt.ɪks/, primarily /ˈpɹaɪ.mə.ɹə.li/, integration /ˌɪn.tɪˈɡɹeɪ.ʃən/, communicate /kəˈmjuːnɪkeɪt/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like skill, edit, developer.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: Tools I use to make MY APPS - Learn English Speaking with Video

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