You enter an artisan's shop and you see weird tools all around.
Not "weird" as in exotic. Weird as in unaccounted for. There is a chisel that is clearly a screwdriver that is clearly a spring that is clearly somebody's Sunday afternoon. Nothing has a label. Everything has a history.
You ask where he got them from, because they are nothing like the ACME Inc stuff you buy off the shelves, and he smirks the smirk of a man who has answered this question a hundred times and still enjoys it:
I made them myself. That one is its Mk 45. It's good, but not perfect yet, it only saves me 10h a week.
Mk 45.
Forty-five. On a hand tool. This man has been shipping versions of a stick since before "iteration" was a word startups rented. And note what he leads with: not the forty-four failures, the yet. The tool is good. It is not perfect yet. The artisan's tools are never finished, only current.
Have you ever been asked: "When are you going to be done with this?". Always a very weird question to answer.
What does "done" mean? It's always a matter of when to draw lines and when to say "NO" to further enhancements.
When you hit diminishing returns it's a good starting point for ending and be done... well, until change happens and the variables change^2 everything again. So is "done" really achievable? Only when you deal with your perfectionism and with the fact that your systems -will- have flaws and that your job is to make sure to cover the majority of the cases gracefully, in a way you can learn from instead of failing spectacularly without ever knowing what was wrong.
Success lies in the tradeoffs. So does failure. But you fail only if you stop at Mk 1 or even before then. Everything else is learning.
The carver's daughters
Back in the day, way back, master carvers used to carve beautiful women on doors, boats, staircases. Figureheads, door knockers, the odd scandalous banister. Turning a hunk of wood into a talisman of luck, lust, and let's be honest, a bit of a flex: look what my hands can do.
Today we do waifus.
Before you snicker: it's the same gesture. It's still an attempt to humanize the craft, to have a relationship with the thing you make. The sailor who carved a woman into his ship's bow wasn't confused about wood. He was negotiating with the sea. The anime girl on a mechanical keyboard is not (always) a cry for help. She's a sigil. Mine keeps the regex honest.
Nothing is new under the sun. Our source-code didn't change much.
I wrote that last line as a joke and then it followed me around for a week, because it's not a joke. Our source-code didn't change much. The carver and the programmer are running the same program on different materials. Both of us:
- Stare at a raw material that does not care about us (wood does not care; the compiler does not care)
- Build tools to shape it, because the shelves don't sell the tool we need
- Put a face on the output, because a face is how you say this one is mine
- Version everything, out loud, with a smirk
The commits? The PRs? They are your Mk 1, 2, 3 .... 152562. You might think it's too microlevel but the devil is in the detail and a single commit, even a oneliner can have a huge impact on your project.
ACME Inc does not know your hands
Here is the actual difference between the shelf tool and the Mk 45, and it's not quality. It's fit.
A shelf tool is an average. It is designed for the median hand doing the median task, which is to say: for nobody. It works fine, which is the most damming thing you can say about a tool. The Mk 45 works for him. It has his calluses mapped into its handle. It is illegible to everyone else in the shop. You would pick it up and put it back down, confused... because it is shaped by forty-four rounds of one man's specific failures.
This is what your dotfiles are. This is what every hacker's .zshrc is: a groove worn by one hand. My terminal is my Mk 45. I have been carving it for two decades and it saves me, conservatively, an ungodly number of hours a week, and to anybody else it looks like a chisel that is clearly a screwdriver. When I built my own terminal — a whole terminal, like an idiot, like a carver — the question was never "why not buy one?", "why not just get this open source one, it's just one download button away!".
The question was what shape does my work want? You cannot answer that at the store or in a README.md on github or on a /download route on a website.
And the tools accumulate you back. Muscle memory is a relationship, not a feature. After enough years, the tool knows your hand, and you stop thinking, and that is the entire point: the tool disappears and only the work remains. The carver wasn't showing me tools. He was showing me the parts of his hands that live outside his body.
Driving for me is the finest example, I don't know if you feel the same but sometimes it's like breathing, it's second nature. The car is like an extension of your legs. If something is wrong with your car you can just feel it. The odd vibration, the weird noise, the different responsiveness of the pedals, etc.
The forty-four are the resume
We keep the wrong artifacts. The shelf tool arrives perfect and stays perfect and teaches you nothing. The Mk 45 arrives wrong, forty-four times, in public, and each wrongness is a decision you can point at: here I learned the handle was too short. Here I learned I don't need the spring at all.
A perfect tool is a finished conversation. A versioned tool is a friendship. With all it's highs and lows.
This website is on Mk-something-hundred — I stopped counting somewhere around the hundred-and-fiftieth hand-built theme, each one a little wooden face saying this one is mine. And yes, some of them are pure AI slop, inspired/driven by a direction. I'll try random themes and make adjustments to them until I realize if it's the case to make them better, more "mine" or just to delete them and move on. The point is that the site is designed to have hundreds of themes.
Why?
Why not?
Nobody asked for a terminal-themed blog. That's how you know it's carved and not bought.
So, what's your Mk 45?
Not your job. Not your stack. The thing you made for your own hands, that nobody else would recognize, that saves you ten hours a week and is still not perfect yet.
If nothing comes to mind — that's not a shame, it's an open door. Start with something small and stupid. Carve the woman on the door. The sea will negotiate.
Enjoy the craft, everything else follows.