Tools for work
Planted 02025-06-30
Understand work by understanding its tools.
I’ve long had a weird compulsion to learn about the various tools used by an industry or area of work and internalize the landscape they make up.
When I got into video editing years ago the simple thing would have been to stick with the first tool I came across and get to work. Instead, off the top of my head, I can still recall important feature sets, differences, and pain points between
- iMovie (Apple)
- Final Cut Pro (Apple)
- Adobe Premiere
- Adobe After Effects
- HitFilm
- Avid
And in design
- GIMP
- Inkscape
- Adobe Illustrator/Photoshop/InDesign
- Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher
- Canva
And in marketing
- Moz
- Ahrefs
- SEMRush
- Screaming Frog
- SiteBulb
- Nightwatch
And in development… well that’s a bigger rabbit hole.
I had a plumbing issue recently and learned all about manual augers, drum augers, flat tape augers, power augers… even after I knew I was only going to buy a drum auger I wanted to know the landscape.
“Conway’s Law” is a reference that you can understand systems by understanding the shape of the organization behind them.
Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.
— Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent?
I think I am drawn to exploring the tool space because it seems clear to me that you can understand work by understanding the tools used to create it.
Tools which create work are constrained to produce outputs that are copies of the structure, logic, and limitations of the tools themselves.
It seems knowledge about tools are a bus ticket of mine — I collect them and keep distinctions just for the love of it.