In my career, about two-thirds of that time I was making something more like a tool than a solution. For Droplets and Atalasoft, it was developer SDKs and for Trello/Atlassian, it was a productivity tool. Our customers used our software to build things. I feel like I did my best work during those times and enjoyed it the most. So, one of the things I am trying to do in 2025 is get back into tool making.

My inspiration is what I’ve called the Great Works of Software and the Great Works of Software Poetry. All of the works I cited in those articles were tools that the authors were using to make something else. I also noticed (after the fact) that 5 of the 7 works I cited were made to help publish writing: TeX, HTML, VisiCalc (for business cases), Markdown, and WikiWikiWeb. Other “great works” like Postscript, PDF, and Alan Kay’s Dynabook concept are also along these lines.

So, perhaps I should be looking at my own publishing aspirations. I did that a couple of years ago when I made Page-o-Mat to make a custom journal. All of the updates to it have been driven by what I wanted in my journals. I had to make it because I felt true friction with existing tools. I could have made my journal in a word processor, but the repetitive nature of the journal pages calls for a programming language.

The pattern of creating a programming language for creating documents seems to come up often. Aside from coming up with words, all of the rest is a pain and ripe for automation, from layout to distribution. Coming up with words is also a pain, but that’s a part I want to do.