About Me

Hi 👋, I’m Jesse

I’m a Product Leader who was born & raised in New England and currently lives near Boston. My brother & I started hacking websites together – and getting paid too much money for them – back in the 90’s. I’ve been hooked on creating stuff on the internet ever since. Now I do my best to make great software products that improve people’s lives.

If you want to reach out, go here to see the various places I hangout on the internet.

Check out my professional background or download my resume (.docx, .pdf, .md)

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Jtrem.com is a personal website (re)launched in 2013 by Jesse Tremblay.

This version of the site was made with Astro and deployed with Netlify. It’a current design is using the Astro Paper template. I’ve trimmed it back to a simple static-site so that I can keep it lightweight, fast and focus on content.

Essential Tools:

Web Development

• GitHub: I manage this site, and some small side projects through GitHub.
• Zed: Written in Rust, Zed is a truely delightful code editor. It has a pretty solid AI assistant built in, but I use it because its simple, fast & highly extensible to fit my workflow.
• Ghostty Confession, I was a stock Mac Terminal user forever. I tried Kitty, Warp, iTerm etc… They weren’t for me. Ghostty is so simple, fast and extensible. I switched as soon as the 1.0 launched and will probably never look back.
• Hover: I have more registered domains than I probably should, and have them all on Hover. I have for years and have never once had a reason not to. It does what it’s supposed to with no bullshit.

General Productivity

• Raycast: I was an Alfred user for about 15 years. Make no mistake, Alfred is awesome. Raycast is just somehow more awesome. It has some more modern niceties that fit into the way I work that were compelling enough for me to switch.
• 1Password: Always a recommendation to family & friends when they are in password hell. If I’m being honest the app has become clunkier over the years, especially with their move to an Electron app. However, it’s still a lifesaver.
• Granola: Anyone that knows me knows how much I detest meetings. I get bored in them for reasons. Granola has been the best meeting summarization tool I’ve ever used, and helped me pick up on things I may have missed in the meeting when my mind wanders.
• Things: It’s a simple task manager that is slick & native. I don’t really need much else.
• Fastmail: My site is built on Astro and my personal email is hosted through Fastmail because its private & fast. The webapp is kind of janky, but using it as a service has been awesome.

Writing

• Drafts: A lot of my ideas, notes and text starts in Drafts as a…draft. Then I send it where it needs to go, like Obsidian, Things, email etc..
• Obsidian: TextEdit —> Evernote —> Bear —> Notion —> Obsidian — that was my progression for managing notes. I made the move to Obsidian becase at it’s core it’s just a front-end to my own markdown files. If Obsidian ever goes away, I never need to worry about accessing my notes because they are mine already, hosted on my own machine(s).
• Superwhisper: I start almost every note, doc and post via dictation now thanks to Superwhisper. The app is super slick and let’s you quickly dictate directly via a keyboard shortcut and paste into any active text box.
• Keychron K2: Pretty barebones and affordable mechanical keyboard.

Reading

• NetNewsWire: My RSS reader of choice. It’s lightweight & fast. That’s about all I’m looking for.
• Feedbin: I moved to Feedbin a few years ago to manage & host my RSS feeds because it’s easy, but I can also send all of my newsletters there and read them just like RSS feeds. Helps me get a single stream of these sort of posts across the webs.
• Audible & Kindle: Putting these together because I use them disgruntlingly. I hate that I don’t own my content, and actively looking for alternatives. Let me know if you have any suggestions!

Discovering

• Arc: It’s a great browser for people who use the internet.
• Kagi: Every search starts here. I moved to Kagi in 2021 when I finally gave up on believing that Google would ever get back to where it was. The two most important things about Kagi imo 1) it’s actually better than Google & 2) I don’t mind spending some money every month for something I literally use dozens of times per day.
• Perplexity: I use Kagi when I need to find something. I use Perplexity when I have a question about something that I know exists on the web.
• Bluesky: I gave up on Twitter in 2019, and only checked it casually. Played around with Mastodon, but found it to be incredibly clunky. I sort of like Bluesky, and have a decently curated feed there. Much easier to customize and create my own “moderation” so that I get the shit I want to see and (mostly) none of the shit I don’t.

Brainstorming

• Claude: My personal advisor. I use Claude when I need to work through ideas, and create a great starting point for new content.
• ChatGPT: My personal assistant. I use ChatGPT when I need to work through more complex tasks & summarize information.

Thanks for stopping by ✌️