Why my apps live on a slice of toast

I live in the UK, and I still don't quite understand beans on toast.

It comes up all the time: in cafés, in conversations, in lists of what to eat when there's nothing in the fridge. Baked beans from a tin, warmed up, poured over toast. Sometimes cheese on top, sometimes not, and people have opinions about which. Everyone seems to agree it's a comfort thing. I've never actually eaten it. The idea doesn't tempt me much, but it does intrigue me, and I can't shake the feeling that I'm missing whatever everyone else gets from it.

The phrase is what got me first, though. Beans on toast. Three short words, completely literal, a bit silly when you say them out loud. It sounds like a joke, but it's a meal.

A name for small things

I make a lot of small apps: little tools and side projects, each one doing one thing. Over time they started to feel as if they belonged together, less like a pile of repositories and more like the output of a tiny studio. I like that idea of being an indie developer: one person making small things, finishing them properly, polishing the details nobody asked about, and never letting any of it grow into a sprawling machine.

A studio needs a name. I wanted it light, a bit warm and not too serious, which is roughly how beans on toast feels from the outside. And the phrase made me laugh, which settled it.

So the apps became beans. beansontoast.app is a slice of toast on a plate, and every app is a named bean sitting on it. Point at one and it wobbles and shows its name; click it and it opens.

The joke in the name

The funny part is that beans on toast is almost the opposite of how I try to make things. It's what you make when you can't be bothered: open a tin, put some bread in, done in five minutes. The apps get made the other way round. I fuss over them. The spacing gets redone, the empty states get written, an animation gets cut and then put back. If I had to pick a kitchen, it would be closer to a small ramen counter in Tokyo than a British café: one person behind the counter, a short menu, and every bowl made with more care than it strictly needs.

I like that gap. The name doesn't take itself seriously, so the whole thing never has to sound important, and the work underneath can be as careful as I want without the brand announcing it. The homepage's tagline, “Small apps, served hot.”, is the same wink.

Beans on toast also means homemade. Nobody orders it expecting a chef; it's what you make in your own kitchen. That part fits exactly. Beans on toast is a company the way a kitchen table is a restaurant: no team, no investors, no roadmap meeting, just a small kitchen and whatever I feel like cooking next.

A breakfast I've never had

Fittingly, the plate in the scene isn't real either. I described a café table with beans on toast to ChatGPT and it made me a picture, which a script then turns into pixel art: shrunk to 320 by 240 pixels, reduced to a warm palette of 29 colours and dithered. Then the details get added by hand: steam rising from the coffee, two people in the background shifting now and then, the window light flickering.

The app beans are lighter than the rest of the pile, with an outline and a soft halo, so you can find them without colour doing all the work. Next to the picture there's a plain menu of the same apps, each with a small screenshot, for keyboards and screen readers, and for anyone who'd rather not hunt for beans.

And then a game

Once the brand was a breakfast, a cooking game was hard to resist. In Short Order you run the hatch of a little beans-on-toast van: toast the bread, warm the beans, plate up, and keep a queue of customers happy before they give up and walk off. It runs over a working week, Monday to Friday, and each day asks you to take a bit more money before closing time.

It isn't finished. You can play it at beansontoast.app/play, but it's an early version: the kitchen works, the regulars complain, and plenty is still being tuned.

Making it has taught me a surprising amount about a meal I've never eaten. I know how golden the toast should be now, and how many beans is too few. I still don't get the appeal, but I've decided that's part of the fun. One day I might even order it.