· 2 min · ai, meta
Why I finally started building the small stuff
I’ve had a mental list of small annoyances for years. A way to generate score cards for boulder competitions instead of copy-pasting names into a spreadsheet template by hand. A way to review my own Magic: The Gathering games instead of squinting at a log file after the fact. A quick way to drill my kid on times tables without me sitting there quizzing out loud every evening.
None of these ever got built. Not because I couldn’t — I do this professionally — but because they weren’t worth it. A weekend of setup, a UI nobody but me would ever see, for a problem that cost me maybe twenty minutes a week. The math never worked out.
That math has changed.
What used to take a weekend now takes an evening, sometimes less. Not because the problems got smaller, but because the distance between “I have an idea” and “I have a working thing” collapsed. I can describe what I want, iterate out loud, and end up with something that runs — without the part that used to kill these projects: the hours of boilerplate, the fiddly bits, the motivation drain of setting up a project just to test one idea.
That’s not a small shift. It moves an entire category of problem from “not worth it” to “sure, why not.” The problems were always there. What changed is that fixing them is finally cheap.
This site is where I’m going to write about that — not in the abstract, but through the actual small tools I keep building because of it. A score card generator. A couple of tiny practice apps for my kids. Whatever comes next. Each one is small, specific, and probably niche. Some of them might be useful to exactly nobody but me. But the interesting part isn’t the tool itself — it’s that it exists at all, and what building it taught me about doing this well.
If you’ve got your own list of small annoyances you never quite got around to fixing, that’s who this is for.