Some software you never stop missing.

ThinkTank was one of the first pieces of software I ever bought. It ran on DOS — that's the operating system that came before Windows, for anyone who wasn't there — and it did one thing with rare elegance: it let you organise your thoughts in a hierarchy. A headline. Children beneath it. The ability to collapse the world down to a single line and expand it back out when you were ready. No friction. No ceremony. Just structure that got out of your way.

When DOS gave way to Windows, ThinkTank gave way too. Its successor, GrandView, carried the torch for a while — a more capable tool, written for Windows, and quite good in its own right. But GrandView eventually disappeared as well, and with it went something that I'd never quite found a replacement for.

Over the years I tried dozens of alternatives. Some were too complex, burying the simple act of outlining under layers of features nobody asked for. Others were too minimal, stripping away the very capabilities — Hoisting, Cloning, Mark and Gather — that made the original worth using. Nothing felt quite right.

So I built Contorno. Not to improve on ThinkTank, but to bring it back — rebuilt for the web, with per-user cloud sync, drag-and-drop reordering, and the full original feature set intact. The name comes from the Italian and Spanish word for contour or outline: the boundary that gives shape to an idea. It felt right for a tool whose whole purpose is to give shape to thought.

L. J. Ribar has been building software since 1983 — the same year ThinkTank was first released. Over the course of his career he has worked across multiple generations of technology, from embedded real-time systems to modern cloud platforms and AI-powered applications.

He has designed and delivered systems for logistics, utilities, agriculture, enterprise platforms, and publishing, serving as a software engineer, architect, consultant, and company founder. The consistent thread across all of it has been a single goal: turning complex ideas into working systems.

Today, through Programmer10K, he works as a fractional CTO and software consultant — helping startups and established companies design scalable architectures, implement AI-driven workflows, and bring products to life without unnecessary complexity.

In parallel, through Wine Glass Press, he writes and publishes across multiple genres while building tools that support authors and creative work. His work sits at the intersection of technology and storytelling — where structure meets creativity, and systems serve people.

Contorno is both a personal project and a professional one: a tool built by someone who has spent four decades thinking about how software should feel, and who remembers exactly what it felt like to use the original.