The Tool Factory

Tools for humans. Very serious maker of industrial-grade tooling, no tomfoolery or silly experiments happening here, no way.

Run by Judah, with a little help from his friends.




small tools, nicest interface, aggresively text-first, fast, useful.

"When you’ve got investors to repay you have to make products for everyone. But when you’re free you can make tools for passionate enthusiasts."

software for friends.

"fuck the users"

free when possible, cheap when not, local-first when feasible.

"people, and their stuff"

Workbench

WOFFER

Subsetting and conversion for variable fonts. →

October 15th, 2023

Printdex

Generate a print-friendly PDF of index cards from Github issues. →

December 8th, 2023.


Now Bot

Key-value store with a Telegram bot as an interface. (with Pradyumna)

December 15th, 2024

Scrapple

Rich text and images on a canvas. Embeds too. And then maybe arrows, someday.

Working as fast as I can.

Handy

Franken-library of web development utilities. (with Astle)

January 15th, 2024

Down & Across

Pretty CSVs in the browser.

January 30th, 2024

Yearly

Planning on the scale of months, not days. Also, a minimal journal. (with Nobu)

February 15th, 2024

Liber

A set of themes, across all the popular publishing platforms (Ghost, Wordpress, Hugo, Eleventy), for setting up sites that work like books. While adding some things that only screens can offer.

See Web Books for examples.

Eventually, but soon.

Korero

Chat bubbles are an incredibly underrated medium for presenting and creating information. I shall free them from the confines of their apps, and maybe add more than just text and images to their toolkit.

Eventually, but soon.

The Joodaloop stack

How then, shall we build a suite of personal tools?

Starterpack of development tools that I recommend to be used together for human-scale projects, based on the principles of efficiency, simplicity, and longevity.

Someday, I will put them all together as a "tiny server" that you can build/run/manage all your personal apps from.

In the not-so-far future.

Plain

What happens if you take plaintext very, very seriously, as a format, database, and an interface? Inspired by Taskpaper, Potluck, Todo.txt, and the Block Protocol.

In the not-so-far future.

Coffer

What would a Substack for publishing databases look like? A normie-friendly, no-config way to gather and display large-ish amounts of foraged data.

Inspired by The Magic of Small Databases.

In the far, far future

Blogdown

Wordpress alternative that uses static files instead of a database model. And maybe a custom dialect of Markdown...?

In the far, far future

My goal is to create an interface for every common kind of data structure/medium. So far, my thinking has covered:

  • plaintext + lists (Plain)
  • tables (Down & Across)
  • databases (Now Bot, Coffer)
  • multi-media infinite canvas (Scrapple)
  • books (Liber)
  • personal sites/blogs (Blogdown)
  • calendars (Yearly)
  • conversations (Korero)

I'm working on these on my own time (my "day job" is a one-man personal site design service), if you'd like to hire/sponsor me, reach out at judah@joodaloop.com.