We spend a lot of time optimizing our code, our stack, and our architecture.
But there’s a smaller friction point that shows up almost every day and rarely gets talked about: finding the right tool when you need it.
Think about how often you do things like:
- format JSON
- generate mock data
- test an endpoint
- convert file formats
- validate something quickly
None of these tasks are hard. The tools exist. The problem is the gap between needing it and getting to it.
For me, that gap usually looks like:
- Pause what I’m doing
- Try to remember a tool
- Open a new tab
- Search
- Click around until I find something “good enough”
It’s only a minute or two, but it breaks flow. And it happens multiple times a day.
I used to rely heavily on bookmarks, but that turned into a mess pretty quickly. Either I over-organized and never used it, or I stopped maintaining it altogether.
Recently, I’ve been trying a different approach: instead of storing tools, I rely on places that make them easy to rediscover on demand.
While exploring this, I came across Unstore, which takes a more browse-first approach to web apps. It feels less like a database and more like a lightweight layer where you can just open something useful and move on.
What I like about this idea is that it matches how we actually work. Most of the time, we don’t need “the perfect tool”, we need something that works right now without breaking momentum.
It made me rethink how much of productivity is really about speed vs. how much is about reducing friction between steps.
Curious how other devs handle this: Do you maintain a system for your tools, or just rely on search and memory?
