Welcome to Workshop

Welcome to a new project: a members-only newsletter experiment on Contraption Company called Workshop.

So far this year, 98k people have read essays on this site^[1], and more than 4k subscribe to its email updates. Posts such as Postcard is now open source (48k readers), Why Ruby on Rails still matters (39k readers), and A mini data center (11k readers) drive most of that traction. Each focuses on a digital tool I had just finished.

I’m proud of these anchor pieces, but they raise the bar for what I feel comfortable publishing. I want to write shorter posts that dive into the Postcard codebase, sketch future projects, or document a tool while I build it. My main newsletter doesn’t feel like the right channel for that, and I have been hesitant to ramble to so many people.

That’s where Workshop comes in. Here I’ll bloviate publish about the process of crafting digital tools. Expect more frequent updates on what I’m building. I hope the conversation around building these projects leads to more tools, which I can showcase in the main newsletter.

So, here goes nothing.

Some other updates:

• With some help from ChatGPT, I added a logo to Toolbox
• I updated the [Projects] page on this site to show Github stars for open-source tools. (Postcard passed 500 stars!)
• I made a Workshop logo and page, which uses a font I discovered in a piece about the branding of Hart Bageri