Tools of the trade

There’s a particular kind of comfort in reaching for a tool you built yourself. You know what it does, you know what it doesn’t do, and you know it’ll be there next time you need it.

Most of the tools I’ve made started as a small annoyance. A unit conversion I kept Googling. A timer that didn’t quite work the way I wanted. A formatter buried three menus deep on some site covered in ads.

SO. MANY. ADS.

Each one took an hour or two to build, and each one quietly removed a tiny bit of friction from the rest of my life.

Why bother

The honest answer is that it’s faster than it looks. The dishonest answer — the one I tell myself when I’m avoiding real work — is that it’s an investment. Both are a little true.

What’s definitely true: a tool you wrote fits your hand. It doesn’t ask you to sign in, it doesn’t track you, it doesn’t change its UI overnight, and it doesn’t disappear when some startup pivots. It’s just there, on a page you control, doing the one thing you needed it to do.

The shelf

This site is partly that — a shelf for the small things I’ve built so I can find them again. Some are useful to other people, some only to me. That’s fine. A workshop is allowed to have tools nobody else would understand.

The trick, I’ve learned, is to lower the bar for what counts as “worth building.” If I catch myself doing the same fiddly thing twice in a week, that’s the signal. Not “is this a good idea for a startup,” not “would anyone else use this,” just — am I tired of doing this by hand? If yes, an hour with a blank file usually beats another month of resentment.

The compounding part

The thing nobody warned me about is that tools start talking to each other. The little JSON formatter ends up pasted into the debugging page. The color picker becomes a component in the next thing. A snippet you wrote for one project quietly becomes the foundation for three more. None of it was planned. It just accumulates, the way a real workshop accumulates jigs and clamps and weird little blocks of wood you can’t throw away because they’re load-bearing now.

After a while you stop thinking of them as separate tools at all. They’re more like extensions of how you work — the shape your hands have learned to make.

A subdomain for each one

Somewhere along the way I started giving each tool its own little home. JSON formatter? json.andremov.dev. Cron builder? cron.andremov.dev. Color converter, gradient generator, regex playground — every one of them lives on its own subdomain, and the URL is usually short enough that I can type it from memory before a search engine could even guess what I meant.

That’s the real win. Not just that the tool exists, but that I can get to it in two seconds from anywhere — laptop, phone, a friend’s machine, a locked-down work environment where I can’t install anything. The deploy step is the user experience.

What’s actually on the shelf

The shelf is, honestly, kind of full at this point. Formatters and converters. Generators for colors, gradients, shadows, favicons, meta tags, placeholders. A regex playground. A cron builder. A grid builder. A markdown previewer. Timers, QR codes, word counters, image converters. A salary converter for talking to recruiters. A holidays page because I kept forgetting which Mondays were off. Plus a small pile of games that exist purely because I wanted them to.

None of it was a master plan. It’s just what happens when you keep saying yes to small ideas. The shelf says: you’re allowed to make things for yourself. That permission, more than any individual tool, is what I keep coming back for.