How did you Hammer? Introduce yourself and share some history

Products Hammer
1

Hi everyone,

As we embark on the journey to revive Hammer for Mac, I wanted to take a moment to reconnect with the incredible community that made it what it was.

Hammer wasn’t just a tool—it was part of workflows, projects, and even careers. For many of you, it played a role in shaping or at the very least, having an influence in your path as developers, creators, and builders. I’d love to hear your stories:

  • How did you first discover Hammer?
  • What projects did it help you create?
  • What’s happened in your career since?
  • And, looking ahead, what role could a new Hammer play in your current work?

This thread is a place to reintroduce yourself, share your experiences, and maybe reminisce a bit about those early Hammer days. Whether you’re still building static sites or have moved on to new frontiers, your journey matters—and I’d love to hear it.

Looking forward to catching up with you all!

Cheers,
Steve

2

I’ll start!

I’m Steve, founder of Beach.

Beach has been a small startup for over 10 years, which has operated our Product suite - Forge, Hammer, Anvil, Chisel and Vulcan in this time.

We also provide services, typically to startups and scaleups, where I’ve personally performed the role of fractional, interim or co-founding CTO. Beach also provides turnkey product innovation services, covering product design, development and operations.

My work on Vulcan took me to Mural in 2020, as Head of Platform and then Head of Ventures. We grew from 80 people to over 1000, ARR $9m to over $120m and a valuation of $2bn. I left Mural in August 2024 to refocus my energy on my own entrepreneurial endeavours.

This brought me back to Beach and our products with a new vision.

At Mural I helped build the extensibility platform that powered internal innovation despite huge architectural, organisational and technical obstacles. We leveraged Forge to avoid huge investment, org growth and multi-quarter roadmap impact since we had most of what we needed already to enable Extensibility as a Service.

I realised this is a problem that any aspiring category leader in SaaS faces, from startup through scaleup. So I’ve returned to Forge and our other products to provide the solution to building Plugin Marketplaces and extensibility platforms.

Hammer is part of that vision. Building PoCs, plugins, product sites etc. are all part of the innovation stack. In the near future we will see a huge transformation in the “who can build” audience, once focussed on engineers, expanding to include people with more knowledge of the problem - the subject matter experts.

Building prototypes, websites, content sites with Hammer was fun for me. I’ve missed it a lot especially as the front end dev world has been crazy for the past 10 years. There’s some peace and satisfaction that comes from going back to basics. It’s therapy.

I also think there’s opportunity, but the process will determine that… for now, I’m just excited to be back at it and applying a lot of what I’ve learned the past 10 years into our own products again.