The tools that define us - Building a tool culture (opens in new tab)

Great post. A point worth highlighting even more than it is in the post is this: "A tool is ready when others can use it."

Totally agree, tools are important and key to real understanding of what you're building. I worked for many years as a tooling and manufacturing engineer (non-software). Our typical product development cycle was something like this:

1) R&D engineer: invent something

2) Process & tooling engineer: invent the manufacturing process and design the tools to build the thing

3) Manufacturing & product engineer: monitor and improve product quality and yield

Many software companies, especially startups focus too much on 1 and not enough on 2 and 3. Also, there's always some friction between the R&D and process/manufacturing camps, the former typically look down on the latter as technicians or paper pushers. In the other direction there's often the perception of R&D as being out of touch with the real world. Also, it's easier to hide incompetence in R&D because the metrics are foggy.

It guess the counterpoint to this is that tools are fun to build and it can be easy to fall into the trap of spending too much time building tools instead of other priorities. I've seen a lot of developers over the years use tool building as a way to procrastinate on more important tasks (myself included), or build things that just become obsolete and useless within weeks

Do you know any full-blown products that started as an internal tool?

Isn't the Swiss Army knife pictured in the dictionary next to "dull tool?"

The cult of the Swiss Army Knife is right up there with the cult of the Leatherman and the cult of WD-40 in encouraging people to fetishize general-purpose but dull tools. The Leatherman is a bit better than the SAK, but it is nothing like a set of top quality tools, just as WD-40 is both a cleaner and lubricant which means it isn't good at either.