Home Assistant has been a revelation in terms of a platform against which to create sensor networks. Their MQTT discovery isn’t ideal but it’s damn good.
Related to this, Tasmota as a platform that I can run on ESP8266 devices to keep my IoT local to my network.
A document scanner connected to Wi-Fi (wish it had the ability to send directly to my laptop instead of having the laptop pull from it, but still 10x better than connecting a USB cable or emailing attachments).
Last night I discovered Tabula, a GUI for extracting tables from PDFs. Saved me more than 10x the time than copy pasting by hand. Fuck banks that only let you download the last 60 days of transactions as a CSV.
Discord is 10x better than most other chat platforms (Slack being the workplace competitor). Mainly this is because of how easy the signup process is.
Django is 10x better than PHP I left.
Pelican is better than WordPress for my needs.
Waze’s ability to search for things along my route (gas, food, coffee, etc.) instead of in my current area.
Reddit. Reddit to me is a community in a box for any new interest. If I pick up knitting, there is already an established knitting community that will have lots of info and helpful people to answer my questions. Same with motorcycles, home improvement, bargain hunting, rug weaving, whatever.
Instagram. It’s 10x better than most social networker for interacting with people. Still sucks, but everything else sucks more.
AirBnB experiences. Had some great tours through them when I visited Italy a couple of years ago and was way easier than the individual scammy-looking tour company sites.