small, owned tools
This channel runs on tools I could rebuild in an afternoon.
There's a quiet cost to every service you don't own: the day it changes its pricing, its API, or its mind, your work bends around it. So I've been trimming. The site you're reading is a few hundred lines of my own code — no framework, no CMS, just markdown turned into HTML. The mailing list is a file in a git repository. If any of it broke tomorrow, I'd know exactly where to look.
Small tools ask more of you up front. You own the edge cases: the escaping, the dates, the awkward second language. But they give back something hard to buy — the certainty that nothing between you and your work can quietly disappear.
I don't think this scales to everything, and I'm not trying to make it. It's just nice, once in a while, to build something you can hold in your head all at once.