About Tech Checklist

Four writers, four desks, one numbered list each.

Tech Checklist is four lists kept by four people who share a domain and not much else.

Nicholas Tong works in security in Houston. Ava Nguyen is a product designer in the Midwest. Ryan Cobbler builds websites for small businesses in the Rust Belt. Jason Lee writes essays about work from the Northeast. Each of them keeps one numbered list of things they have actually lived with: bought or been handed at work, set up, used on ordinary days, and kept long enough to know what the thing is like once the new wears off.

Security & Systems Correspondent

Nicholas Tong

Beat
Cybersecurity, infrastructure, hardware, developer tooling
From
Houston, Texas
On the list
46 items

Nicholas Tong covers security and infrastructure for Tech Checklist from Houston. His career started eight years ago on a local helpdesk, answering tickets for an IT shop that looked after other people's offices. After a year at Amazon in Austin he moved back home, and he now works in detection engineering.

At home he runs a homelab of firewalls, mini PCs and a NAS that keeps outgrowing its closet, reads protocol specs for the fun of it, and keeps the battery backup charged from June through November. His reviews say what a product costs in setup hours and what breaks first.

Enter Nicholas's desk RSS feed

Lifestyle & Design Blogger

Ava Nguyen

Beat
Cozy tech setups, career pivots, design, life admin, money, wellness
From
US Midwest
On the list
48 items

Ava Nguyen is a product designer at a healthcare startup in the Midwest. She came up in print, doing brand work, and started writing when she moved over to screens. The posts kept wandering, to desk setups, budgets, rest and the objects that make a third-floor walk-up feel like home, and her readers came along.

She is twenty-five and keeps more planners than pens. Everything on her list was bought with her own money and used for a good long while before she wrote about it, and every review comes with a plain tally of what it cost.

Enter Ava's desk RSS feed

Practical Tech & Small Business Blogger

Ryan Cobbler

Beat
Web advice for small businesses, self-taught development, tools, local business
From
US Rust Belt
On the list
47 items

Ryan Cobbler spent twelve years on HVAC service calls before he taught himself to code at thirty-eight, on a secondhand ThinkPad, after his kids were asleep. He now builds and looks after websites for small businesses in the Rust Belt, including a dentist, two plumbers, a bowling alley and a tax prep office.

He writes about the tools those businesses run on and puts the monthly bill next to every one. He pays for what he recommends out of his own pocket, takes no money from software vendors, and answers reader questions himself.

Enter Ryan's desk RSS feed

Work, Craft & Culture Essayist

Jason Lee

Beat
Work culture, decision-making, tools, the economics of the creator economy
From
US Northeast
On the list
45 items

Jason Lee writes essays about work, judgement and craft, and about the specific ways smart people talk themselves into bad decisions. He spent six years in management consulting and two in product at a mid-size SaaS company, then left eighteen months ago with a modest runway and no plan.

He is thirty-five and lives in the Northeast. He reads the footnotes other people skim, says who paid for a study before he quotes it, and writes late, because he is not a morning person and has stopped pretending to be one.

Enter Jason's desk RSS feed

How the lists work

Every review is one item on one writer's list, numbered from 01. The number is a place, not a score. Item 30 is not worse than item 03, it is just further down, and it keeps its number, so "Nicholas 09" always means the same review. Each desk page runs in list order, top to bottom, rather than newest first.

Two dates on every review

The publish date is when the review went up here. The source date is the date of the main outside source the writer checked prices and specifications against, so you can see how old the numbers underneath are. Prices move. Check the current one before you buy.

Why the desks look nothing alike

Each desk is set up the way its writer works, down to the type, the colors and how the list is laid out. A security engineer, a designer, a former HVAC tech and an essayist do not keep their notes the same way, and the pages do not pretend otherwise. The bar along the top of every page is the one thing the four share, and it takes you from one room to the next.

Following along

Every desk has its own RSS feed, linked from the foot of its pages. The site feed carries all four. To find one product across every list, use search.