I’m so excited to announce a project that has consumed way too much of my free time. Introducing… Formal Methods Tools at fmtools.fyi

Motivation

Formal methods are the mathematical tools you use when “tested OK” isn’t strong enough: you specify what a system must do and then prove it does, before it can fail in the wild. The field is big and scattered — dozens of tools, each with its own domain, interface, and pet formalism — and a project often lives or dies on finding the right tool for the job. fmtools.fyi catalogs them: what exists, what each tool is for, what it supports, and where it lives.

Beyond saving people an afternoon of archaeology, the catalog is an invitation: build it together, keep it current, and introduce students to new tools while they are still new. If a better catalog already exists somewhere, send it my way — I genuinely tried to find one first.

Development

I built the site with Hugo, a fast static site generator, using a custom theme I wrote from scratch for this project. The theme has its own layouts for tool listings, search, and comparison pages, plus shortcodes for tool metadata and figures.

The theme leans on Hugo’s own strengths and keeps JavaScript to a minimum, so the pages stay fast. The CSS matches the site’s branding and is organized as small commented modules.

Longevity

My goal is to support and update this site throughout the rest of my academic career, and my dream is that the formal methods community will find value in it for years to come. I plan to keep this thing alive for as long as I’m in academia, which is the only promise I’m qualified to make.

To help the project stay alive, the site is designed for easy community contributions. The project is open source and available on GitMoss, my self-hosted git server. Have a tool you’d like me to add? Please request it or create a pull request to add it yourself.