the studio
A tiny studio with a night shift.
trolls.dev is an independent software studio that designs, builds, and runs its own products. No clients, no investors, no roadmap committees — just a small crew and a workshop that never really closes.
why trolls?
The work happens while the world sleeps
In the old stories, the little folk slip into the workshop at night and finish the shoemaker's work by morning. That's the energy this studio runs on: quiet hours, steady hands, and something useful on the bench when the sun comes up.
We're deliberately tiny, and we plan to stay that way. Every product we ship began as something we wanted for ourselves — and everything we ship, we keep running for the long haul. That single constraint shapes all the rest: what we build, how small we keep it, and how much we sweat the details.
how we work
Six things we believe
Not a methodology, not a framework — just the rules of thumb that decide what gets built here and what doesn't.
- 01
Build for ourselves first
Every product starts as something we wanted for ourselves. If we wouldn't reach for it every week, we don't build it — scratching your own itch is the cheapest user research there is.
- 02
Small is a feature
Big software promises everything and demands your whole workflow in return. We make tools that do one thing well, and we treat that narrowness as a promise, not a limitation.
- 03
Ship small, ship often
A useful thing in your hands today beats a perfect thing that never launches. Small releases keep us honest: real users, real feedback, real soon.
- 04
Run what we ship
No handoffs, no 'v1 and vanish.' Everything we release, we operate — which means every shortcut we're tempted to take, we'd be the ones paged for at 3 a.m.
- 05
Respect the user's attention
Fast pages, readable type, ad-free where it counts. Attention is the most expensive thing a product can spend, so we spend as little of yours as possible.
- 06
Stay tiny on purpose
No investors to impress, no meetings about meetings. A deliberately small crew can care about details that a big one has to triage away.
The longer versions live in our notes from the night shift.
colophon
How this site is made
We hold our own site to the same standard as our products: fast, quiet, and honest about what's under the hood.
- Framework
- Astro — pages are rendered to plain HTML at build time. Almost every page on this site ships zero JavaScript.
- Styling
- Tailwind CSS, with a palette borrowed from the night shift: cream paper, deep navy, and a streak of troll-blue. Flip the moon in the header and the site works the hours we do.
- Type
- System sans for reading, JetBrains Mono for the labels — the same faces our social cards are drawn with.
- Social cards
- Every page's Open Graph image is generated at build time with Satori — no screenshot services, no third-party calls.
- Syndication
- Notes ship over RSS, and llms.txt gives AI answer engines a map of the site. Crawlers are welcome here.
- Mascots
- The trolls. They work while the world sleeps, and they take full credit for anything that ships before sunrise.
See what the night shift made
The proof is in the products — and the thinking behind them is in the notes.