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Small, Sharp Tools

brandur.org · 1,215 words · saved by 1 readers

Upon joining Heroku a few years back, one of the maxims that I heard cited frequently was that of building small, sharp tools, the idea of building minimalist, composable programs that worked in concert to a degree of effectiveness that was more than the sum of their parts. The classic example of such a system was the Unix shell, which contains a set of small utilities that provide a highly effective operating environment. Despite its origin in Unix, a number of people at Heroku including a founder and a few lead engineers had found that it lent itself quite naturally to building modern web platforms. The best documented original source for this idea is the book The Art of Unix Programming written by Eric S. Raymond. In the book, the author boils down the overarching philosophies of Unix into a number of digestible rules, three of which are particularly applicable: (I’d highly recommend reading the rest of the rules and the whole book in depth as well.) More background for the idea is

Small, Sharp Tools — brandur.org brandur.org Articles Atoms Fragments Newsletter Sequences Now Uses About Auto Small, Sharp Tools Article Small, Sharp Tools 🔗 Published Dec 12, 2014 Location San Francisco I'm on X/Twitter at @brandur . Dec 12, 2014 The web The catch Reconciliation Upon joining Heroku a few years back, one of the maxims that I heard cited frequently was that of building small, sharp tools , the idea of building minimalist, composable programs that worked in concert to a degree of effectiveness that was more than the sum of their parts. The classic example of such a system was

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