Recommendations

Open source or otherwise free software

Here is a collection of useful software that I personally recommend. They are all free to download and use and most of them are open source. All the links on this page go directly to each developer's own website where you should be able to download the software. The icons next to each reommendation denotes whether the software is compatible with Microsoft Windows or Apple MacOS.

"The top 10 in-demand jobs in the future don’t exist today. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that haven’t been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet."
— Richard Riley

                
                    CODING
                
                    Visual Studio Code
                    
                    Code editing. Redefined. Free. Built on open source. Runs everywhere.
                
                    BlueGriffon
                    
                    BlueGriffon is an excellent WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) web authoring tool with a nice visual user interface. It is capable of showing you exactly what you pages will look like on the web. It is powered by Gecko, the same rendering engine you can find at the heart of Firefox, and is filled with tons of powerful features.
                
                    Twine
                    
                    Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories. You don't need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you're ready.

                    ALSO RUNS DIRECTLY IN YOUR BROWSER
                
                    Scratch
                    
                    With Scratch, you can program your own interactive stories, games, and animations — and share your creations with others in the online community. It is provided free of charge.

                    ALSO RUNS DIRECTLY IN YOUR BROWSER
                
                    Godot
                    
                    The game engine you waited for.

                    Godot provides a huge set of common tools, so you can just focus on making your game without reinventing the wheel. 
                    Godot is completely free and open-source under the very permissive MIT license. No strings attached, no royalties, nothing. Your game is yours, down to the last line of engine code.
                
                    GRAPHICS
                
                    Krita
                    
                    Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program. It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone.
                
                    Inkscape
                    
                    Inkscape is a professional vector graphics editor. It's free and open source. 

                    GIMP
                    
                    GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. 

                    Blender
                    
                    Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation.
                
                    MISCELLANEOUS
                
                    FileZilla
                    
                    FileZilla is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface.
                
                    Scribus
                    
                    Scribus is an open source desktop publishing program. Underneath a user-friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK colors, spot color support, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.
                
                    Discord
                    
                    Discord is an all-in-one voice and text chat for gamers that's free, secure, and works on both your desktop and phone.