Good tools are rare. We should make more!

Most tech companies are full of different custom helper tools. I don’t even mean “big” tools — like frameworks, libraries or programming languages. Think about the little apps we all use to help with debugging or creating test objects. Or your Feature Flag management system — or the inspection tools that Customer Support uses to help your users.

This is understandable — in some ways, I don’t want my tools to be exciting. I want them to let me do what I need to do, and allow me to get on with my day. From a certain angle, I want them to be invisible.

I think this is simultaneously the easiest and hardest thing to get right. Usually, when working on tooling, we’re hyper-focused on a specific problem.

This makes it easy to also make a hyper-specialized tool that requires a lot of project/team/domain specific knowledge to be able to use well. To some degree, this is inevitable — if you’re working on a tool that helps with managing microservices, people using the tool need to have a concept of what a microservice is!

Can you make that accessible to people whose day-to-day life doesn’t revolve around Kubernetes, Helm, and Terraform? Can you make your tool hide some of the underlying complexity?

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