Most of my workdays are pretty predictable.
I pull data from one place, clean it up a bit, paste it somewhere else, and move on. Docs, logs, JSON blobs, CSV exports — nothing fancy, just the usual engineering glue work.
The problem is that not all environments are equal.
Some platforms aggressively sanitize input.
Some internal tools block inline scripts.
Some docs systems don’t like raw HTML.
And sometimes I just need to share something temporarily without changing the original format.
This usually shows up in the most boring part of the workflow:
“Can you send me that snippet?”
Not a repo.
Not a deployment.
Just a quick reference.
When Copy–Paste Stops Working
A few examples that come up more often than I’d like to admit:
- A markdown file that breaks when pasted into a ticket system
- A small HTML fragment that gets escaped everywhere
- A data sample that shouldn’t be committed anywhere
- A note I want to share once, then forget about
In theory, there are “proper” ways to solve all of these.
In practice, spinning up infra or cleaning data for a one-off handoff is a waste of time.
So this is where temporary tools sneak into my workflow.
Temporary Tools Are Not Architecture
I’m very deliberate about not treating these tools as solutions.
They’re not part of the system.
They’re not dependencies.
They’re not something I want to rely on long-term.
They exist in the gap between:
- “I need this now”
- “This does not deserve a permanent place”
For me, that usually means:
- Encode something
- Move it across a boundary
- Decode it later
- Delete and move on
No accounts.
No dashboards.
No permanence.
One-Off Encoding for Safe Sharing
Sometimes the only thing I care about is making sure the content survives the trip.
Not prettier.
Not optimized.
Just unchanged.
That’s when I’ll reach for a simple encoder/decoder tool — something like mmtocm.net — do the transformation, pass the result along, and forget it ever existed.
I don’t bookmark it.
I don’t integrate it.
I don’t build workflows around it.
It’s just there to unblock the moment.
The Real Rule I Try to Follow
If a tool starts to feel important, it’s probably the wrong tool.
Temporary problems should have temporary solutions.
Anything else tends to calcify into tech debt — even outside of code.
So I keep these things intentionally disposable:
- No saved state
- No attachment
- No expectations
Solve the immediate friction, then get back to actual work.
That’s it.
No magic.
Just less friction in the middle of the day.
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