Workstation4, the name from a shared computer
Where the name came from (a label on a school computer), the friend who put it there, and why I finally decided to brand everything I build under it.
Every app I make now goes out under one name: Workstation4. The name is older than any of the apps, though. It comes from a sticker on a computer.
In high school I shared a computer in programming class with my friend Diana. The machines in the lab were all labeled, and ours was “Workstation 4.” We sat there together writing Visual Basic, which I genuinely hated, the first and last time I ever touched it. But the name stuck in my head for twenty years.
I’d been sitting on the domain for a while without doing much with it. At some point I just decided: this is the brand. Everything I make on my own time, the little apps, the side projects, all of it lives under Workstation4 now. It isn’t a company so much as a label for “things Todd made because he wanted to.”
Most of these are small apps I build to earn a little extra income, but mostly to keep my skills sharp between day jobs. I recently put together a site to collect them all, part portfolio, part diary: the things I’ve made and what I learned making each one. If you read any of the app posts here, that site is the home base.