About Toolgebra
I don't have a great origin story for Toolgebra. One day I needed to convert a vertical column of strings to a horizontal comma separated list. A simple google search showed a few sites - but all of them were riddled with ads.
This gave me the idea that I could create a clean website with such tools and without any ads. Yes there are many such utility sites. But a clean ad free one could still be useful. If the tools were fully client side it would keep the costs down to zero and let the site be ad-free.
As I thought more about the idea, I realized that I wanted it to work like unix shell commands where we pipe one tool's output to another. Just like shell scripts are built by one person and shared with others, these tools could be combined into shareable workflows.
The simplest analogy I can think of to explain the idea is "Tools are functions". That in turn led to the name "Toolgebra" - the algebra of tools.
This could very well be a solution in search of a problem. But I don't mind spending time building it anyway as it is quite fun. Try it and let me know if you found it useful.
About me
I am yet another software engineer working in a SaaS company. In the past I have co-founded and helped build Inkmonk, a printing services platform. Unfortunately that didn't become the grand success as we had hoped and I had to leave it behind. But the hunger to create something valuable did not go away.
When AI tools started becoming powerful, I started playing around with different ideas. Tools like Claude Code have made it possible for a solo developer to build much bigger ideas in a much shorter time frame than it used to take.
So far, I have prototyped at least three different ideas
- Jotdowns - a personal productivity tool for managers and leads (Not yet in a working condition)
- TwinPendulums - a website with a collection of science and maths simulations. Still a work in progress - so only some simulations would work as intended
- And finally Toolgebra - the one you are seeing now.