Two small tools: RenderMD and Share
The best personal tools ask for nothing — no account, no subscription, no server if a file will do. Two recent ones follow that rule closely.
Most of what I build for myself has a narrow mouth and a deep throat: trivial to start, but still useful as the problem grows. It reads plain formats and writes plain formats. It survives being ignored for a year and still works when you come back. These two are good examples.
RenderMD — Markdown into real reports
I write almost everything in Markdown, but Markdown looks like a draft. RenderMD turns a .md file into a self-contained HTML technical report: cover page, metadata pulled from the frontmatter, custom colours and code highlighting, ready to print to PDF.
The important part is what it doesn't need. You open app.html in a browser — no server, no install — drag your file in, adjust the metadata it detected, and download. The frontmatter does the talking:
---
title: "Report title"
subtitle: "Short description"
author: "Name Surname"
date: "2026-05-20"
classification: "Internal use"
---For automation there's also a small pandoc pipeline for batch generation in CI. But the point of the project is the browser flow: a tool that needs the cloud to render a Markdown file has confused its own importance.
Share — give something away without giving it to a server
Share is a zero-knowledge sharing service running entirely on Cloudflare Workers and KV. You encrypt in the browser with AES-GCM; the key never touches the server — it travels in the URL hash, the part the browser never sends:
share.yous.dev/v/aZ8c3K1q#k=key-never-touches-the-serverOn top of that: an optional password layer (PBKDF2, 250k iterations), a configurable TTL — one hour, a day, a week, or burn-after-read — and a small public API so other tools can use it. The server stores an opaque blob and knows nothing about what's inside. That's the whole idea: the simplest design that makes "I can't read your data" a property of the architecture, not a promise.
If it can't run offline on a slow machine, it isn't a personal tool — it's someone else's product wearing your data.
Where the two meet
RenderMD integrates Share's public API directly — partly as a proof that the API actually works for outside tools, and partly because it solves a real annoyance. A self-contained .html file is great until you try to send it: handing someone a raw HTML file, especially on a phone, often doesn't render the way you'd hope. So RenderMD can push the report through Share and hand back a link instead.
Open that link on anything — a phone with no laptop in sight — and the report renders perfectly, because the rendering happens in the browser and every browser is compatible. No "download this file and hope it opens." Just a URL that works everywhere, with Share's encryption underneath.
Neither of these ships as a polished SaaS, because the interesting part is the system, not a funnel around it. Small surface, no telemetry, no server unless the problem genuinely needs one — and when two small tools click together like this, that's the whole reward. Field notes over case studies.