Home-Cooked Tools

Most of the software we use at work wasn’t built for us. It was built for everyone.

That’s fine. But the one small task you repeat every day, the one that takes twenty minutes of copy, paste and checking, probably isn’t worth a purchase order. It might be worth an afternoon.

Cooking at home#

Building a small tool is like cooking at home. You don’t need to be a professional chef. The result won’t win awards, but that’s not the point. It does exactly what you need, no more.

And something happens when you cook. You start to appreciate good restaurants more. The same is true here. Every time I build something small, I appreciate well-built software more. The empty states, the error messages, the things you only notice when they’re missing.

What I’ve learned#

1. Start with one annoying task. Not a platform. A task.
2. Make it one file. If it opens by double-clicking, people will actually use it.
3. Keep it read-only if you can. Tools that can’t change anything are easy to trust.
4. Test on messy, real input early. Your clean sample file is lying to you.
5. Don’t worry if it isn’t perfect. That’s part of the fun.

If you’ve never built anything for yourself, start this week. It doesn’t need to be impressive. It just needs to be yours.