Crafter Station has been a WhatsApp group first and a website second for a while now. More than a thousand people building across Latin America, fifty-something events and hackathons, a hundred-plus products shipped, and a pile of open source that people actually install. Almost none of it written down anywhere you could link to.
This blog is where that changes. We are starting with something simple: telling you what we are doing, while we do it.
What you will find here#
Two things.
What we ship. New tools, new pages on this site, new editions of hack0, products that leave the lab. Every post goes out the same day the work does, so the date you see is the real one.
What we learn. Why we picked one thing over another, what broke on us, what we would do differently. That part almost never gets written down, and it is the part we would have wanted to read when we started.
You will see four labels on posts: engineering, community, product, and research. They are a reading aid, not a taxonomy. There are no category pages to wander into.
Why in public#
Most of what happens in the community happens in chat, and chat does not compound. A good explanation of how someone got their CLI onto npm helps the twelve people who were online that afternoon, then scrolls away.
Writing it down forces us to understand it better, and it leaves something behind that the next builder can find. If it turns out to be useful to you too, even better.
We are not going to post every day. We are going to post when there is something worth telling.
How to follow along#
This is a normal blog with a few extra doors:
- An Atom feed for your reader.
- Every post as markdown: append
.mdto any post URL, or ask for it withAccept: text/markdown. - A markdown index of every post, for agents and models that would rather read a list than crawl.
If you would rather try the tools before reading us, the docs and the open source catalog are right there. And if you build in LatAm and are not in the community yet, come say hi.
See you in the next one.