A Small Utility I Needed in the Middle of a Workflow

I was in the middle of a small data cleanup task for a side project.

Nothing fancy — just parsing a CSV, normalizing a few values, and checking the output against some reference documentation. Most of the work was already scripted, but I hit one of those annoying micro-problems that doesn’t really belong in code.

Some of the specs I was cross-checking used millimeters. My dataset was already standardized in centimeters.

Normally I’d just eyeball it or do the math in my head, but after switching contexts a few times, I realized this was exactly the kind of tiny task that quietly breaks focus.

I didn’t want to:

add a helper function

write a quick script

install another package

open a spreadsheet just for this

It wasn’t a “tooling decision”. It was just something blocking the next step.

So I paused the workflow for a moment and used a simple unit conversion page I could access instantly in the browser. No setup, no state, no commitment. I typed the value, got the result, and went straight back to my editor.

This one, for example: https://mmtocm.net

That was it. I didn’t save it, bookmark it, or integrate it anywhere. It wasn’t part of the project. It just helped me move past a friction point without changing my setup.

I think a lot of developer workflows have these moments — not big enough to automate, not important enough to engineer properly, but still disruptive if you ignore them.

For me, the goal wasn’t finding the best solution. It was finishing the task and staying in flow.

Once the numbers were verified, I closed the tab and continued with the script. No trace left behind, which is exactly what I wanted.