Where the name comes from
In the Poetic Edda — the thirteenth-century Icelandic manuscript that preserves the oldest Norse mythology — the god Odin keeps two ravens: Hugin (Thought) and Munin (Memory). Each morning he sends them out across the nine worlds. Each evening they return and whisper into his ear everything they have seen.
He worries about both. But he says he worries more about Munin — Memory — because thought can come back, but memory, once lost, is gone for good.
Why this name for a software studio
We chose Huginara because the work of building software is the same work Hugin does: flying out, paying attention, returning with what is worth bringing back. The -ara is Latin for altar — the place to which something returns and is laid down with care.
We are not Hugin. We are not in the flight. We are the perch. Each tool we make is something a raven noticed in the world, and we shaped it slowly, until it could be used.
How we work
Slow. We make one product at a time. We finish before we start another. Small. We stay small on purpose. A two-person studio cannot fake a 200-person product — we make what fits our hands. Lamplit. We work in the quiet hours: focused, unhurried, the way scribes worked in scriptoria a thousand years ago. Long. We make things that should still be useful in ten years. Not because we know what the future needs, but because patience is the only test we trust.
Cogitatio redeuns — thought, returned.