14 ms·

An app can be a home-cooked meal

556 points by mkeeter 7y ago

Apocryphon 7y ago
Now, this is wholesome.
JoeSmithson 7y ago
Imagine a world where the ability to make a personal app like this is actually as easy as making a home-cooked meal; a skill passed from parent to child in the natural course of growing up.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  With kids today playing with things like the Swift Playground on iPad, I don't think we're far from it
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Cooking is orders of magnitude harder for me than making an app, so I’d think we’re already there…
  - sevencolors 7y ago
    Dunno what you learning style but some folks appreciate this site http://www.cookingforengineers.com/ http://www.cookingforengineers.com/
  - machtesh 7y ago
    Gosh I wish it was the opposite to me! Cooking seems fairly easy and making apps seems daunting. I started a newsletter with very quick tips on cooking if you ever want to learn. It's easier than you think! https://aldente.substack.com https://aldente.substack.com
  - nine_k 7y ago
    You normally finish cooking within a few hours. Making a worthwhile mobile app in a few hours is still mostly a dream. When cooking, you make a fresh copy of a meal according to a recipe. A fresh copy of an app is of not much use; it's as if you needed to invent a new recipe and then cook it. Cooking really tasty dishes takes experience; but the same holds for software engineering.
  - mattkrause 7y ago
    Do you want to learn? If so, here’s some advice. 1. Start with an “easy” cookbook. There’s a whole genre of cookbooks for people starting out in their own or newly single dads. One of my first was “Dad’s Own Cookbook”, which has decent recipes that aren’t a huge production. After that, get the “Joy of Cooking”, which has a huge number of recipes from many cuisines. Also, take a look at Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”. You may not be interested in many of the recipes (e.g., aspic) or even French food, but I found it very helpful to see how a “master” recipe could be forked into many different dishes. 2. When you make something for the first time, follow these rules. - Read the ENTIRE recipe carefully before you start. - Follow it exactly. Don’t substitute anything or “add your own twist”. You gotta eat every day, so you’ll get a chance to do that soon. - Prep everything in advance. Dice the onions and put them in a bowl. Open up the can of tomatoes. Peel the carrots, chop them, and put them in another bowl. Measure the spices out into a shot glass. Yes, you will have to do a few more dishes. Yes, you will have some dead time while the oil heats up or the onions soften. When you’ve more experience, you can start interleaving things but in the meantime, you’ll avoid burning things while you learn how much time and attention various things take. - Clean as you go. Having a cramped, cluttered counter stresses me out and often leads to mistakes. - Try new recipes out under low-stakes conditions, not when you’re hosting your boss and girlfriend’s parents. 3. Get a decent knife and learn how to use it. You don’t need a $500 Japanese Santoku, but get something decent and keep it sharp. There are standard ways to dice an onion (etc). Do them smoothly first and the speed will come. If you’ve got friends in food service, they might be willing to help. (Exception: tourné is fairly silly) 4. Have fun and don’t take this too seriously. If all else fails, just order pizza.
  - gwd 7y ago
    I've cooked lots of tasty, nutritious food in half an hour, and I rarely spend more than an hour cooking. I can only dream of a world where I could write an app in an hour that would be as enjoyable to use as the food I can cook in an hour is enjoyable to eat!
    - notduncansmith 7y ago
      I think game jams probably get closest to this proportion of work:enjoyment in software.
    - nradov 7y ago
      Nothing takes half an hour if you count shopping, prep work, and cleanup.
  - 101008 7y ago
    I think the hardest part of an app is distribution, sharing, etc (I am not talking about being popular, but signing the app, upload to a marketplace, etc). I think theere could be an analogy about cooking for yourself in your ktichen (developing local, the app works on your phone), or cooking for a lot of people in a enviroment which you dont know (a friend's kitchen, etc). You know that i fyou don't use your utensils, or your favourite pan, or your hoven (you know exactly the times and temperature), it won't be the same.
- FearNotDaniel 7y ago
  That's pretty much the way life was for me in 1982. Of course, you couldn't make an app 'like this' in the 8-bit days - no networking, no onboard camera, no touch screen - but my Dad & I sat literally at the dinner table and wrote home-cooked apps together. We learned to code together, but he taught me how to make the computer do useful things: as a language teacher he created quiz games that he could take in to use in his high school classroom. I seem to remember designing custom fonts to get the accents right on the French words (did I mention, no Unicode?)
userbinator 7y ago
roughly half of that time was spent wrestling with different kinds of code-signing and identity provisioning and I don’t even know what. It's worth noting that in the early era of personal computing, companies did not view users as idiots to be herded and restricted by their technology, and computer magazines contained source code listings.
- the-dude 7y ago
  TV's and radio's used to contain their schematics on paper.
  - orf 7y ago
    And at a certain complexity level it’s not with printing out reams of minute schematics about the thousands of components inside a modern flat screen that nobody will ever read. Go get them via PDF on the internet, if available.
    - Nextgrid 7y ago
      I think his point is that back in the day manufacturers were happy to provide the resources needed for users to repair their products (or delegate it to a third-party of their choosing). This is not the case anymore. You are not going to find a manufacturer-approved source for schematics for most modern consumer products. The only way these schematics surface on the web is by being stolen and leaked by factory workers and this could take considerable time from the release of the product. Manufacturers also try to corrupt the law to their advantage by lobbying against bills such as the right to repair with completely insane arguments (often involving safety, etc - the typical “think of the children” nonsense) which sadly work against clueless senators (or whatever the people at these hearings are called in the US). You can check out Louis Rossmann’s YouTube channel for recent examples of this.
    - myself248 7y ago
      The "if available" part is the problem. I'd be 100% fine with electronic delivery, if they were simply available. Having to go to dodgy websites with my browser in paranoid mode just to find documentation to try to keep my gizmo out of the e-waste stream a little longer, is suboptimal. Learning and fixing should not feel like a crime.
_bxg1 7y ago
Something about the personality of a programmer draws us towards that ever-fleeting siren of The Infinite. Infinite scalability, infinite reusability, infinite growth. It's this lust for the Bigness that our code could theoretically reach that causes most of us to pass right by the myriad of opportunities for small, more meaningful, more human software.
- bitwize 7y ago
  Maybe, if you read a lot of Paul Graham essays and are seduced by the siren call of startups and VCbux. But I'm more captivated by the infinite possibilities of the thing sitting right in front of me. And I bristle at machines thousands of times more powerful than my old Commodore actively preventing me from exploring those possibilities without identity management, app signing, hooking up an even bigger computer to my small computer, et weary cetera. But what do I know, I'm just a lizard person. My small computer is really a phone, an inherently social tool. Its manufacturer didn't intend for me to easily hack it, therefore I've really no right to.
- err4nt 7y ago
  The opposite pulls of designing for a human, versus designing for all of humanity
- zanderwohl 7y ago
  I relate to the sentiments of this article. Smallness is a commodity we programmers forget the value of too frequently. After reading the article the other week about the person who had their entire life managed in a single text file, I felt inspired to start doing the same. I have a python script that crawls the file and then sorts it all by date, plus a little command-line interface for checking off items or aggregating things by person or topic, but not much more. A text file isn't a good way to store data for a big application, but I know the exact limits of what I want to do, so I'm not going to use a database or anything more advanced than a human-readable .txt file. So far I've spent more time writing the script than time I've saved by using it, but what else is new for a personal project?
akavi 7y ago
Maybe dumb question: How does he specify whom the message is sent to? Or is it broadcast?
- _bxg1 7y ago
  I assume it's hardcoded to broadcast to all users
kgraves 7y ago
So an internal tool?
gklitt 7y ago
"Home-cooked" software is such a lovely analogy. I've used the same comparison to explain my unease about ad-hoc spreadsheets being replaced by domain-specific software [1]. Often the new software is "better" just like restaurant food is "better" than a home-cooked meal, but it's also great when people can build small-scale, super flexible software that works perfectly for just their own needs. 1: https://twitter.com/geoffreylitt/status/1177607448682582016 https://twitter.com/geoffreylitt/status/1177607448682582016
- myself248 7y ago
  I loved TFA's callout to HyperCard, like your own argument about spreadsheets being "flexible generic tools". I feel like IFTTT is approaching the same level of utility, though it exists in a space where it's incredibly vulnerable to change against its users' interests. A few more tools like spreadsheets and HyperCard, and a whole lot of people with home-kitchen level of software competence, could free us from a lot of expensive restaurant dining. And we'd be more self-sufficient, to boot. What's it take to get HyperCard back? Or something like it? Not just functionality, but ubiquity -- being a tool that every kid is one click away from, nothing to install, no permission to ask, just start learning...
  - vertex-four 7y ago
    The problem is that the tasks we ask of our software are harder - we now expect them to talk to other computers, not all of which really want to be talked to by random people writing one-off bits of software.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      > not all of which really want to be talked to by random people writing one-off bits of software. That's a bigger problem than it sounds. There are two main reasons software doesn't want to talk to each other. One, preventing vandalism and general abuse. Two, rent seeking. The software is wrapped around something you need, and it'll only allow access on its own terms, and after an appropriate fee. I dream of an Internet where this isn't the case. In particular, I dream of an Internet where I don't have to choose between either writing scrappers, or entering separate relationships with companies for every little bit of information I want to fetch via an API. Those relationships are a problem and a liability, even if they don't incur any actual monetary costs. Beyond just being annoying noise that you have to keep track of, relationships make software non-shareable; they force you to centralize. If I make my "home-cooked" app that needs to know the weather, currency rates and be able to derive geographic coordinates from addresses, that's three separate APIs, three separate relationships. I'm not going to ask any of my users (whether five or five million) to get their own API keys, get their own relationships with the API providers. I'm forced to put a server in front of the app, introducing a single point of failure, shackling the app - and more importantly, I'm forced to force the users to enter a relationship with me. Their copy of the app is now dependent on my server not going down, and me managing my relationships with API providers. Cooking recipes people share never force you to use a particular ingredients supplier. They don't even care where you get the ingredients - whether you grow them, buy them, or receive them as gifts. I wish software was more like this.
spiderjerusalem 7y ago
Putting the 'personal' back in computing, this is great!
sevencolors 7y ago
I really identify with his home cook metaphor. I love cooking for folks and often get compliments that I could be a chef. Mostly because I’ve been cooking since I was a child. Ironically I’ve become a “software engineer” in a similar manner, 10 years of just trying things out and making things for friends and family. I do agree we’re getting to a space in software development that’s making it a bit easier to play and experiment with ideas. I think it would amazing if folks could get a BlueApron like expenience and make an app that would be useful
- dontdoitpls 7y ago
  Making 1 app is fine. Web or Android, no problem. Both? Double your dev time. React native you say? Double your dev time to learn a weird language. Want to service 100% of people? Spend 1000$+ on apple products and beg Apple to let you publish.
  - sevencolors 7y ago
    I still think all these details could be solved for with a friendly IDE for beginners. In most cases folks just want to build a thing for themselves or a small group. Right now the tooling is still unfriendly to most but it feels like it’s moving towards something better Here’s an example, I built a simple app to keep a schedule for watering my various plants that all have different needs. Originally it was just a google sheet but I saw an opportunity to play with ReactNative and expand my knowledge A lot of everyday people, have spreadsheets like this that could be friendlier. They’re not trying to ship it to thousands just themselves and maybe a friend. Like sharing a meal and then the recipe :)
z3t4 7y ago
I've been wondering lately if there is any business opportunity in personal IT... More and more technology is entering our homes... We hire people to do plumbing and electrical installations, maybe we should also hire people to do the software...
- jon-wood 7y ago
  Its nowhere near the level of everyone hiring plumbers and electricians, but if you’re really interested hunt down some home automation companies (or start your own). If you can find the right clients you can easily make five digits a job setting up Home Assistant to run someone’s new house.
- deleted 7y ago
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jayd16 7y ago
I do miss the haphazard personal website of yore. That said, it's probably quite a bit less secure to run this stuff yourself.
- netsharc 7y ago
  Maybe he's using static hosting, like Hugo (https://gohugo.io/ https://gohugo.io/)?
ramoz 7y ago
I like thinking about coding with these type of metaphors. Coding, imo, is more like a puzzle. I get cooking but it's a bit too abstract for something as deterministic as most coding is. I do see it applying to the experimental side. Relating to puzzle... - Design: you "know" what you want your outcomes to look like - Software: you "know" the type of pieces you're dealing with (there can be variants) - Compile: pieces can only fit to exact tab/blank structure(per piece variant) - Iterate: your entire design is systematic. In complex puzzles, your early decisions can greatly alter future state. How you progress and build in later states is important to. - Can be good, eg like puzzle-solving strategies that are very specific in the beginning, but enable rapid/seamless building in the future. - Can be bad, eg it may seem like you're mostly complete in the later states, however, there are holes and holes left ignored are a liability for the acceptable state. You might find that you've incorrectly placed pieces that seemed viable in the past, but leave you in conflicted situations in the future.
- savolai 7y ago
  Coding is often seen as technical/deterministic as the makers are often technical, and so the mediun is typically used in a fashion that affords scaling and regularity. There is nothing inherently deterministic about coding as a medium of expression; the fact that the basis is binary doesn't decrease the power of expression we can wield vis-a-vis analog media. Of course there are constraints of the tooling; but whether you are inherently building something that it makes sense to compare to a puzzle is entirely up to you as a creator.
  - ramoz 7y ago
    I respect this. > There is nothing inherently deterministic about coding as a medium of expression I don't disagree with this and realize I failed to recognize this perspective... even myself, generally, I internalize & embrace expression through coding. I metaphorize coding as a puzzle mostly when debugging or designing complex software.
jrochkind1 7y ago
I remember the fantasy that more and more people would be able to develop simple basic apps for their own very personal customized needs. It was a vision of a more accessible and democratic compute infrastructure, where we'd all be 'makers' creating the compute environment we lived in. Things like hypercard were part of this vision. Those days are gone. The article doesn't explicitly mention the fact we all know: Very few people have the capacity to create a 'home-cooked meal' like the OP, for their own use. In fact much fewer than could create a little hypercard app. It's a world where there are pretty large barriers to most people being software 'makers', and instead we are just consumers who can choose from what is offered to us by various companies trying to figure out how to monetize our needs and desires. Part of it is the increased complexity of app development. Part of it is the walled gardens of our suppliers. > I distributed the app to my family using TestFlight, and in TestFlight it shall remain forever: a cozy, eternal beta. Indeed. Because the very infrastruture ignores the needs of one-off "home cooked meal" apps, it assumes they don't exist, you have to pretend it is some kind of "beta" of a mass market commodified product instead (and be glad our suppliers still let you do that for 'free'). Our computers (increasingly the phone/device is people's primary computer) are no longer ours to do with as we will. It is sad. If those who created the computing revolution 30 years ago (including prior versions of us) could see where it wound up.... the level of technological sophisitication of our pocket audio-video-geolocated-self-surveilling-communicating devices is astounding; the lack of 'empowerment' or control we have over them is utterly depressing.
- qiqitori 7y ago
  > in TestFlight it shall remain forever: a cozy, eternal beta. When I read this I thought -- oh man, I hope Apple doesn't decide to somehow limit this feature in the future. I wouldn't be surprised if it's already against the terms of service somehow to deploy a 'beta' app and then just keep using it forever. (Besides, don't you have to pay to be in the developer program? That may be somewhat acceptable for some adults, but kids whose parents would prefer that their kids "study" instead of "wasting time playing computer games"?) Anyway, this is one of the reasons I use Android. While becoming root isn't realistic on many devices, I think it allows you to do enough for kids to find their way into programming. Maybe the challenge of getting a root shell/flashing your own OS is enticing to some too. And maybe the tech used to protect devices from their users is interesting to some people too -- and since OEMs need to know how all this stuff works, it also happens to be documented pretty well. (I think this tech is still in its infancy unfortunately.)
peteforde 7y ago
Robin is a fascinating and wonderful human. He's the author of "Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore" and "Sourdough", a champion of small-press publishing and married to a woman who is an olive expert. https://fat.gold/ https://fat.gold/
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ivan_ah 7y ago
Anyone interested in creating a "home cooked meal" for Android using scratch-like drag and drop components? Check out https://appinventor.mit.edu/ https://appinventor.mit.edu/ It builds an .apk for you and all. It's primarily intended for teaching kids how to code, but seems like it's a good fit for simple apps like the one described by the OP.
laurieg 7y ago
Recently I wanted to make a few simple apps that would make api requests and control a few things around my house set up with raspberry pis. A friend recommended me the drag and drop app builder Thunkable[1] and I was blown away by just how easy it was to make something. In a couple of hours I had all the apps I needed. No complicated build process, just download the apk from the site. Some people might turn their noses up at it because it uses scratch for writing the code but I feel this is what people's first experience of coding should be like. Write a simple recipe, get a simple program that they can use straightaway. These that must be an app or a web app to have any relevance to people. [1] https://thunkable.com/ https://thunkable.com/
- Yenrabbit 7y ago
  Thanks for the recommendation! This is very much what I've been looking for. Easy GUI, super simple to use, but can go deep and get it to do most things I'd want. After several false starts looking at the different app options, this is so refreshing :)
- anhner 7y ago
  Well that's one piece of software I'm never going to use. I can't even browse their site without creating an account. I presume I also need an account in order to use the software. No thanks.
- te_chris 7y ago
  I've done a bit of Salesforce dev as I'm CTO of a small startup (~12 headcount currently). The Process and Flow builders are a breath of fresh air to allow me to do simple logic based programming tasks which respond to events and data changes on the platform. It's great! I have 0 desire to learn Apex and our requirements are moderately complicated but easily encapsulated by what you can do with the configuration frameworks and logic-based visual progamming system. 100% think more platforms should have this.
- brutt 7y ago
  Can you post links to these apps?
- 7y ago
habosa 7y ago
That's a great metaphor, I make apps just for myself or a few friends sometimes and this is exactly how I feel about it. For instance I made an app called "YourSquare" that's just like FourSquare but 100% private and local to my phone. No real point to it, I could make Google Maps do what it does, but it's a home cooked meal.
bentcorner 7y ago
I've done something very similar for my wife: She likes reading otome visual novel games on Android and the game design/monetization strategy means that it's difficult to "go back" to a story line. I noticed her repeatedly screenshotting her phone and asked what she was doing - she said she likes to re-read the stories and so she swipes through her gallery to satisfy this need. So I built a simple wrapper around adb, built a plain C# WPF front end for the wrapper and passed through clicks and automated screenshot calls for her. So she plugs in her phone, fires up the app, and she can read her VNs on her PC and have screenshots saved on the PC for her. I built a variety of other processing apps to solve other needs for managing these files. There were some free-to-download apps that solved a lot of these problems but none in quite the right way, and a lot of them looked fairly sketchy. I don't really have any intention of distributing the software I wrote because it's so specific to her needs, and at best I might throw it up somewhere so I have the source backed up, as every once in awhile she asks for something new to add to this program.
- philangist 7y ago
  Wow this is awesome. Who said programmers aren't romantic?
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Reminds me of the QueryStorm story; apparently the project started because the author wanted to help his girlfriend with her work (which involved lots of data and Excel files). http://blog.querystorm.com/index.php/2018/04/04/whynow/ http://blog.querystorm.com/index.php/2018/04/04/whynow/
dangoor 7y ago
I exchanged a couple of tweets with Robin about this. I think this app is really cool, and I didn't want to get nerdsniped, but it seems to me that this could be built using webapis today. So you could have a cross-platform compatible version that doesn't require code signing, etc. That would be really nice. Got me thinking how cool it would be if there was then an easy way for anyone to instantiate a copy for their own family. They own the data, they just pay for what little they use of S3 and lambda.
danfang 7y ago
This resonated with my own personal experience building a messaging app for my closest friends and family. It's been a steady 8-12 daily active users for the past few months. I'll probably write a blog post in the future about what it does and why we use it. I'm also considering open sourcing the entire project! https://get.thread-app.com/ https://get.thread-app.com/
- petejodo 7y ago
  I've been wanting an app like that for awhile now. I started messing around prototyping something like that around planning events with others. I'm excited to see what more of this!!
gorgoiler 7y ago
I absolutely love this comparison. Making computers do what you want using a core set of skills, personal taste, some equipment, and a set of reference works is absolutely analogous to cooking at home for the family. I feel a bit like this touches on operating systems as well. After a decade with macOS — away from Debian, ion3, evince, Firefox, and to some extent the command line — I get that same feeling of overexposure one might feel after eating out for every meal. Restaurant food is polished and diverse but it’s overly tasty and the options for customization are coarse (no pun intended.) You can choose a dish but not how it’s made. The analogy with home cooking makes me want to go back to a computing environment where I get to put the ingredients together that work best for me even if it isn’t something that’s perfect enough to sell to other people. Hackable window managers aren’t the be all and end all but they are a good example of what I’m talking about. Time to buy that $100 Thinkpad, I guess.
teddyh 7y ago
Now, some of you may not ever write computer programs, but perhaps you cook. And if you cook, unless you're really great, you probably use recipes. And, if you use recipes, you've probably had the experience of getting a copy of a recipe from a friend who's sharing it. And you've probably also had the experience — unless you're a total neophyte — of changing a recipe. You know, it says certain things, but you don't have to do exactly that. You can leave out some ingredients. Add some mushrooms, 'cause you like mushrooms. Put in less salt because your doctor said you should cut down on salt — whatever. You can even make bigger changes according to your skill. And if you've made changes in a recipe, and you cook it for your friends, and they like it, one of your friends might say, “Hey, could I have the recipe?” And then, what do you do? You could write down your modified version of the recipe and make a copy for your friend. These are the natural things to do with functionally useful recipes of any kind. Now a recipe is a lot like a computer program. A computer program's a lot like a recipe: a series of steps to be carried out to get some result that you want. So it's just as natural to do those same things with computer programs — hand a copy to your friend. Make changes in it because the job it was written to do isn't exactly what you want. It did a great job for somebody else, but your job is a different job. And after you've changed it, that's likely to be useful for other people. Maybe they have a job to do that's like the job you do. So they ask, “Hey, can I have a copy?” Of course, if you're a nice person, you're going to give a copy. That's the way to be a decent person. — Richard Stallman, 2001 (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.html)
- Joe-Z 7y ago
  Sounds nice, except programming is difficult and akin to magic for most people. Achieving what‘s proposed here, namely wanting to get a job done, but your requirements for it are different from how your friend uses it, is usually achieved by having a program that takes a lot of configuration parameters and then does the job according to them. IMO that‘s the more fitting analogy.
  - learnstats2 7y ago
    but... that type of program doesn't exist. Most (non-technical) people settle for using software that isn't really designed for their use case. Non-technical people use a lot of magical hacking to make things work approximately how they want.
eandre 7y ago
I really appreciate the approach of building something simple (in user experience but also in implementation). These days it's so easy to get sucked in and end up spending months setting up Kubernetes clusters and the "that won't scale"-type thinking.
ricg 7y ago
A while back I came to realize that not every app I produce (I'm an Indie Mac/iOS dev) has to be polished and App Store-ready. I can write an app for an audience of one - me. Getting an app ready for an App Store easily adds 50% of development time. A home-cooked app can have hard coded values (oh yeah!), doesn't have to be pretty (although it's more fun), doesn't have to support all platforms (no, I won't add Apple Watch support!), it just has to work for me. My latest project: a little iOS app that I can use at a bookstore to scan the book's barcode and then checks if that book is available at my local public library. When I showed that to my SO she was amazed and said: "And you just made THAT?". Well, yes. My secret superpower is that I can make these little computers that we all keep in our pockets these days make anything I want them to. A few other projects that I made for myself over the years: - App that generates PDF invoices from my App Store financial reports (I simply paste in the plain text from the website) - A break timer app (old one was 32bit-only, I didn't bother to download a new one) - Text snippet app: it scans an email for the senders name and pre-populates possible answers. I turned this into a tiny CRM that keeps track of feature requests and whom I sent an update. This is actually in the App Store, but was a huge commercial failure, but I use this myself e v e r y day. - Quick click: it's like a command line for my Mac. I type something I see on the screen (e.g. the title of a button), the app highlights possible matches, I press Return and the app sends a simulated mouse click. I can also use this as a window manager to resize the active app, because, why not? For personal use: - Portfolio simulator app that calculates every possible IRR for a given number of years (once I was done I discovered portfoliocharts.com, well...) - Portfolio tracker app to track my retirement savings: this is like a tiny spreadsheet app only that it's fed by 3 csv files (orders.csv, transactions.csv, asses prices.csv). "editing" is done in VIM. The app generates various reports that I use to check if I'm on track with my savings. - Simple stock checker app (fetches the prices of a, yes, hard-coded list of ticker symbols). - App to categorize my spendings. Input is a csv file (I like plain text). I wanted to learn now Naive Bayes filtering works and have to say, seeing the app do its thing is as close to magic as I ever got. - Time lapse screen recorder: creates a screenshot every x seconds. I used this once to record a video of how I'm developing an app. - Custom implementation of Unshaky (with more stats and settings) to fix the double-space keypress issue of my new MacBook Air - Alarm clock app that uses the accelerometer to wake me when I'm not in a deep sleep phase. And a few more that I don't use anymore...
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DaveSapien 7y ago
"Home-cooked" software is such a perfect analogy to indie game development. It resonates with me much more that other terms like "full stack", "Dev ops", and so on. It nicely removes the guilt of not writing the perfect codebase, as we often have to sacrifice that in order to ship a game. For me indie games might not be the michelin star earners some of the time, but they warm the stomach. With imperfect charm they offer the delightful experiences just like home cooked patisserie. (edit formatting)
Zanneth 7y ago
My brother and I built an app together that is only used by the two of us. It’s a simple way to keep a shared ledger between the two of us because we split a lot of expenses as roommates. We’ve been using it almost every day for about 10 months now. In a way it’s different from the author’s app because our app is over-engineered in some pointless but extremely fun ways. It’s also similar in that it will: - Never break unexpectedly due to an unwanted app update - Never spy on us and steal our personal information - Look and behave exactly the way we want it to, and no other way I highly recommend building an app in this way. For me it reminded me what I love about programming, and allows me to work on a project unhindered by meetings, project managers, or deadlines. Just like cooking something for yourself, it can be as perfect or as imperfect as you want it to be, as well as an exercise in self-expression.
hamidul 7y ago
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556 points by mkeeter 7y ago

Now, this is wholesome.

Imagine a world where the ability to make a personal app like this is actually as easy as making a home-cooked meal; a skill passed from parent to child in the natural course of growing up.

_bxg1 7y ago
With kids today playing with things like the Swift Playground on iPad, I don't think we're far from it
saagarjha 7y ago
Cooking is orders of magnitude harder for me than making an app, so I’d think we’re already there…
- sevencolors 7y ago
  Dunno what you learning style but some folks appreciate this site http://www.cookingforengineers.com/ http://www.cookingforengineers.com/
- machtesh 7y ago
  Gosh I wish it was the opposite to me! Cooking seems fairly easy and making apps seems daunting. I started a newsletter with very quick tips on cooking if you ever want to learn. It's easier than you think! https://aldente.substack.com https://aldente.substack.com
- nine_k 7y ago
  You normally finish cooking within a few hours. Making a worthwhile mobile app in a few hours is still mostly a dream. When cooking, you make a fresh copy of a meal according to a recipe. A fresh copy of an app is of not much use; it's as if you needed to invent a new recipe and then cook it. Cooking really tasty dishes takes experience; but the same holds for software engineering.
- mattkrause 7y ago
  Do you want to learn? If so, here’s some advice. 1. Start with an “easy” cookbook. There’s a whole genre of cookbooks for people starting out in their own or newly single dads. One of my first was “Dad’s Own Cookbook”, which has decent recipes that aren’t a huge production. After that, get the “Joy of Cooking”, which has a huge number of recipes from many cuisines. Also, take a look at Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking”. You may not be interested in many of the recipes (e.g., aspic) or even French food, but I found it very helpful to see how a “master” recipe could be forked into many different dishes. 2. When you make something for the first time, follow these rules. - Read the ENTIRE recipe carefully before you start. - Follow it exactly. Don’t substitute anything or “add your own twist”. You gotta eat every day, so you’ll get a chance to do that soon. - Prep everything in advance. Dice the onions and put them in a bowl. Open up the can of tomatoes. Peel the carrots, chop them, and put them in another bowl. Measure the spices out into a shot glass. Yes, you will have to do a few more dishes. Yes, you will have some dead time while the oil heats up or the onions soften. When you’ve more experience, you can start interleaving things but in the meantime, you’ll avoid burning things while you learn how much time and attention various things take. - Clean as you go. Having a cramped, cluttered counter stresses me out and often leads to mistakes. - Try new recipes out under low-stakes conditions, not when you’re hosting your boss and girlfriend’s parents. 3. Get a decent knife and learn how to use it. You don’t need a $500 Japanese Santoku, but get something decent and keep it sharp. There are standard ways to dice an onion (etc). Do them smoothly first and the speed will come. If you’ve got friends in food service, they might be willing to help. (Exception: tourné is fairly silly) 4. Have fun and don’t take this too seriously. If all else fails, just order pizza.
- gwd 7y ago
  I've cooked lots of tasty, nutritious food in half an hour, and I rarely spend more than an hour cooking. I can only dream of a world where I could write an app in an hour that would be as enjoyable to use as the food I can cook in an hour is enjoyable to eat!
  - notduncansmith 7y ago
    I think game jams probably get closest to this proportion of work:enjoyment in software.
  - nradov 7y ago
    Nothing takes half an hour if you count shopping, prep work, and cleanup.
- 101008 7y ago
  I think the hardest part of an app is distribution, sharing, etc (I am not talking about being popular, but signing the app, upload to a marketplace, etc). I think theere could be an analogy about cooking for yourself in your ktichen (developing local, the app works on your phone), or cooking for a lot of people in a enviroment which you dont know (a friend's kitchen, etc). You know that i fyou don't use your utensils, or your favourite pan, or your hoven (you know exactly the times and temperature), it won't be the same.
FearNotDaniel 7y ago
That's pretty much the way life was for me in 1982. Of course, you couldn't make an app 'like this' in the 8-bit days - no networking, no onboard camera, no touch screen - but my Dad & I sat literally at the dinner table and wrote home-cooked apps together. We learned to code together, but he taught me how to make the computer do useful things: as a language teacher he created quiz games that he could take in to use in his high school classroom. I seem to remember designing custom fonts to get the accents right on the French words (did I mention, no Unicode?)

userbinator 7y ago

roughly half of that time was spent wrestling with different kinds of code-signing and identity provisioning and I don’t even know what. It's worth noting that in the early era of personal computing, companies did not view users as idiots to be herded and restricted by their technology, and computer magazines contained source code listings.

the-dude 7y ago
TV's and radio's used to contain their schematics on paper.
- orf 7y ago
  And at a certain complexity level it’s not with printing out reams of minute schematics about the thousands of components inside a modern flat screen that nobody will ever read. Go get them via PDF on the internet, if available.
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    I think his point is that back in the day manufacturers were happy to provide the resources needed for users to repair their products (or delegate it to a third-party of their choosing). This is not the case anymore. You are not going to find a manufacturer-approved source for schematics for most modern consumer products. The only way these schematics surface on the web is by being stolen and leaked by factory workers and this could take considerable time from the release of the product. Manufacturers also try to corrupt the law to their advantage by lobbying against bills such as the right to repair with completely insane arguments (often involving safety, etc - the typical “think of the children” nonsense) which sadly work against clueless senators (or whatever the people at these hearings are called in the US). You can check out Louis Rossmann’s YouTube channel for recent examples of this.
  - myself248 7y ago
    The "if available" part is the problem. I'd be 100% fine with electronic delivery, if they were simply available. Having to go to dodgy websites with my browser in paranoid mode just to find documentation to try to keep my gizmo out of the e-waste stream a little longer, is suboptimal. Learning and fixing should not feel like a crime.

_bxg1 7y ago

Something about the personality of a programmer draws us towards that ever-fleeting siren of The Infinite. Infinite scalability, infinite reusability, infinite growth. It's this lust for the Bigness that our code could theoretically reach that causes most of us to pass right by the myriad of opportunities for small, more meaningful, more human software.

bitwize 7y ago
Maybe, if you read a lot of Paul Graham essays and are seduced by the siren call of startups and VCbux. But I'm more captivated by the infinite possibilities of the thing sitting right in front of me. And I bristle at machines thousands of times more powerful than my old Commodore actively preventing me from exploring those possibilities without identity management, app signing, hooking up an even bigger computer to my small computer, et weary cetera. But what do I know, I'm just a lizard person. My small computer is really a phone, an inherently social tool. Its manufacturer didn't intend for me to easily hack it, therefore I've really no right to.
err4nt 7y ago
The opposite pulls of designing for a human, versus designing for all of humanity
zanderwohl 7y ago
I relate to the sentiments of this article. Smallness is a commodity we programmers forget the value of too frequently. After reading the article the other week about the person who had their entire life managed in a single text file, I felt inspired to start doing the same. I have a python script that crawls the file and then sorts it all by date, plus a little command-line interface for checking off items or aggregating things by person or topic, but not much more. A text file isn't a good way to store data for a big application, but I know the exact limits of what I want to do, so I'm not going to use a database or anything more advanced than a human-readable .txt file. So far I've spent more time writing the script than time I've saved by using it, but what else is new for a personal project?

akavi 7y ago

Maybe dumb question: How does he specify whom the message is sent to? Or is it broadcast?

_bxg1 7y ago
I assume it's hardcoded to broadcast to all users

kgraves 7y ago

So an internal tool?

gklitt 7y ago

"Home-cooked" software is such a lovely analogy. I've used the same comparison to explain my unease about ad-hoc spreadsheets being replaced by domain-specific software [1]. Often the new software is "better" just like restaurant food is "better" than a home-cooked meal, but it's also great when people can build small-scale, super flexible software that works perfectly for just their own needs. 1: https://twitter.com/geoffreylitt/status/1177607448682582016 https://twitter.com/geoffreylitt/status/1177607448682582016

myself248 7y ago
I loved TFA's callout to HyperCard, like your own argument about spreadsheets being "flexible generic tools". I feel like IFTTT is approaching the same level of utility, though it exists in a space where it's incredibly vulnerable to change against its users' interests. A few more tools like spreadsheets and HyperCard, and a whole lot of people with home-kitchen level of software competence, could free us from a lot of expensive restaurant dining. And we'd be more self-sufficient, to boot. What's it take to get HyperCard back? Or something like it? Not just functionality, but ubiquity -- being a tool that every kid is one click away from, nothing to install, no permission to ask, just start learning...
- vertex-four 7y ago
  The problem is that the tasks we ask of our software are harder - we now expect them to talk to other computers, not all of which really want to be talked to by random people writing one-off bits of software.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > not all of which really want to be talked to by random people writing one-off bits of software. That's a bigger problem than it sounds. There are two main reasons software doesn't want to talk to each other. One, preventing vandalism and general abuse. Two, rent seeking. The software is wrapped around something you need, and it'll only allow access on its own terms, and after an appropriate fee. I dream of an Internet where this isn't the case. In particular, I dream of an Internet where I don't have to choose between either writing scrappers, or entering separate relationships with companies for every little bit of information I want to fetch via an API. Those relationships are a problem and a liability, even if they don't incur any actual monetary costs. Beyond just being annoying noise that you have to keep track of, relationships make software non-shareable; they force you to centralize. If I make my "home-cooked" app that needs to know the weather, currency rates and be able to derive geographic coordinates from addresses, that's three separate APIs, three separate relationships. I'm not going to ask any of my users (whether five or five million) to get their own API keys, get their own relationships with the API providers. I'm forced to put a server in front of the app, introducing a single point of failure, shackling the app - and more importantly, I'm forced to force the users to enter a relationship with me. Their copy of the app is now dependent on my server not going down, and me managing my relationships with API providers. Cooking recipes people share never force you to use a particular ingredients supplier. They don't even care where you get the ingredients - whether you grow them, buy them, or receive them as gifts. I wish software was more like this.

spiderjerusalem 7y ago

Putting the 'personal' back in computing, this is great!

sevencolors 7y ago

I really identify with his home cook metaphor. I love cooking for folks and often get compliments that I could be a chef. Mostly because I’ve been cooking since I was a child. Ironically I’ve become a “software engineer” in a similar manner, 10 years of just trying things out and making things for friends and family. I do agree we’re getting to a space in software development that’s making it a bit easier to play and experiment with ideas. I think it would amazing if folks could get a BlueApron like expenience and make an app that would be useful

dontdoitpls 7y ago
Making 1 app is fine. Web or Android, no problem. Both? Double your dev time. React native you say? Double your dev time to learn a weird language. Want to service 100% of people? Spend 1000$+ on apple products and beg Apple to let you publish.
- sevencolors 7y ago
  I still think all these details could be solved for with a friendly IDE for beginners. In most cases folks just want to build a thing for themselves or a small group. Right now the tooling is still unfriendly to most but it feels like it’s moving towards something better Here’s an example, I built a simple app to keep a schedule for watering my various plants that all have different needs. Originally it was just a google sheet but I saw an opportunity to play with ReactNative and expand my knowledge A lot of everyday people, have spreadsheets like this that could be friendlier. They’re not trying to ship it to thousands just themselves and maybe a friend. Like sharing a meal and then the recipe :)

z3t4 7y ago

I've been wondering lately if there is any business opportunity in personal IT... More and more technology is entering our homes... We hire people to do plumbing and electrical installations, maybe we should also hire people to do the software...

jon-wood 7y ago
Its nowhere near the level of everyone hiring plumbers and electricians, but if you’re really interested hunt down some home automation companies (or start your own). If you can find the right clients you can easily make five digits a job setting up Home Assistant to run someone’s new house.
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jayd16 7y ago

I do miss the haphazard personal website of yore. That said, it's probably quite a bit less secure to run this stuff yourself.

netsharc 7y ago
Maybe he's using static hosting, like Hugo (https://gohugo.io/ https://gohugo.io/)?

ramoz 7y ago

I like thinking about coding with these type of metaphors. Coding, imo, is more like a puzzle. I get cooking but it's a bit too abstract for something as deterministic as most coding is. I do see it applying to the experimental side. Relating to puzzle... - Design: you "know" what you want your outcomes to look like - Software: you "know" the type of pieces you're dealing with (there can be variants) - Compile: pieces can only fit to exact tab/blank structure(per piece variant) - Iterate: your entire design is systematic. In complex puzzles, your early decisions can greatly alter future state. How you progress and build in later states is important to. - Can be good, eg like puzzle-solving strategies that are very specific in the beginning, but enable rapid/seamless building in the future. - Can be bad, eg it may seem like you're mostly complete in the later states, however, there are holes and holes left ignored are a liability for the acceptable state. You might find that you've incorrectly placed pieces that seemed viable in the past, but leave you in conflicted situations in the future.

savolai 7y ago
Coding is often seen as technical/deterministic as the makers are often technical, and so the mediun is typically used in a fashion that affords scaling and regularity. There is nothing inherently deterministic about coding as a medium of expression; the fact that the basis is binary doesn't decrease the power of expression we can wield vis-a-vis analog media. Of course there are constraints of the tooling; but whether you are inherently building something that it makes sense to compare to a puzzle is entirely up to you as a creator.
- ramoz 7y ago
  I respect this. > There is nothing inherently deterministic about coding as a medium of expression I don't disagree with this and realize I failed to recognize this perspective... even myself, generally, I internalize & embrace expression through coding. I metaphorize coding as a puzzle mostly when debugging or designing complex software.

jrochkind1 7y ago

I remember the fantasy that more and more people would be able to develop simple basic apps for their own very personal customized needs. It was a vision of a more accessible and democratic compute infrastructure, where we'd all be 'makers' creating the compute environment we lived in. Things like hypercard were part of this vision. Those days are gone. The article doesn't explicitly mention the fact we all know: Very few people have the capacity to create a 'home-cooked meal' like the OP, for their own use. In fact much fewer than could create a little hypercard app. It's a world where there are pretty large barriers to most people being software 'makers', and instead we are just consumers who can choose from what is offered to us by various companies trying to figure out how to monetize our needs and desires. Part of it is the increased complexity of app development. Part of it is the walled gardens of our suppliers. > I distributed the app to my family using TestFlight, and in TestFlight it shall remain forever: a cozy, eternal beta. Indeed. Because the very infrastruture ignores the needs of one-off "home cooked meal" apps, it assumes they don't exist, you have to pretend it is some kind of "beta" of a mass market commodified product instead (and be glad our suppliers still let you do that for 'free'). Our computers (increasingly the phone/device is people's primary computer) are no longer ours to do with as we will. It is sad. If those who created the computing revolution 30 years ago (including prior versions of us) could see where it wound up.... the level of technological sophisitication of our pocket audio-video-geolocated-self-surveilling-communicating devices is astounding; the lack of 'empowerment' or control we have over them is utterly depressing.

qiqitori 7y ago
> in TestFlight it shall remain forever: a cozy, eternal beta. When I read this I thought -- oh man, I hope Apple doesn't decide to somehow limit this feature in the future. I wouldn't be surprised if it's already against the terms of service somehow to deploy a 'beta' app and then just keep using it forever. (Besides, don't you have to pay to be in the developer program? That may be somewhat acceptable for some adults, but kids whose parents would prefer that their kids "study" instead of "wasting time playing computer games"?) Anyway, this is one of the reasons I use Android. While becoming root isn't realistic on many devices, I think it allows you to do enough for kids to find their way into programming. Maybe the challenge of getting a root shell/flashing your own OS is enticing to some too. And maybe the tech used to protect devices from their users is interesting to some people too -- and since OEMs need to know how all this stuff works, it also happens to be documented pretty well. (I think this tech is still in its infancy unfortunately.)

peteforde 7y ago

Robin is a fascinating and wonderful human. He's the author of "Mr. Penumbra's 24-hour Bookstore" and "Sourdough", a champion of small-press publishing and married to a woman who is an olive expert. https://fat.gold/ https://fat.gold/

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ivan_ah 7y ago

Anyone interested in creating a "home cooked meal" for Android using scratch-like drag and drop components? Check out https://appinventor.mit.edu/ https://appinventor.mit.edu/ It builds an .apk for you and all. It's primarily intended for teaching kids how to code, but seems like it's a good fit for simple apps like the one described by the OP.

laurieg 7y ago

Recently I wanted to make a few simple apps that would make api requests and control a few things around my house set up with raspberry pis. A friend recommended me the drag and drop app builder Thunkable[1] and I was blown away by just how easy it was to make something. In a couple of hours I had all the apps I needed. No complicated build process, just download the apk from the site. Some people might turn their noses up at it because it uses scratch for writing the code but I feel this is what people's first experience of coding should be like. Write a simple recipe, get a simple program that they can use straightaway. These that must be an app or a web app to have any relevance to people. [1] https://thunkable.com/ https://thunkable.com/

Yenrabbit 7y ago
Thanks for the recommendation! This is very much what I've been looking for. Easy GUI, super simple to use, but can go deep and get it to do most things I'd want. After several false starts looking at the different app options, this is so refreshing :)
anhner 7y ago
Well that's one piece of software I'm never going to use. I can't even browse their site without creating an account. I presume I also need an account in order to use the software. No thanks.
te_chris 7y ago
I've done a bit of Salesforce dev as I'm CTO of a small startup (~12 headcount currently). The Process and Flow builders are a breath of fresh air to allow me to do simple logic based programming tasks which respond to events and data changes on the platform. It's great! I have 0 desire to learn Apex and our requirements are moderately complicated but easily encapsulated by what you can do with the configuration frameworks and logic-based visual progamming system. 100% think more platforms should have this.
brutt 7y ago
Can you post links to these apps?
7y ago

habosa 7y ago

That's a great metaphor, I make apps just for myself or a few friends sometimes and this is exactly how I feel about it. For instance I made an app called "YourSquare" that's just like FourSquare but 100% private and local to my phone. No real point to it, I could make Google Maps do what it does, but it's a home cooked meal.

bentcorner 7y ago

I've done something very similar for my wife: She likes reading otome visual novel games on Android and the game design/monetization strategy means that it's difficult to "go back" to a story line. I noticed her repeatedly screenshotting her phone and asked what she was doing - she said she likes to re-read the stories and so she swipes through her gallery to satisfy this need. So I built a simple wrapper around adb, built a plain C# WPF front end for the wrapper and passed through clicks and automated screenshot calls for her. So she plugs in her phone, fires up the app, and she can read her VNs on her PC and have screenshots saved on the PC for her. I built a variety of other processing apps to solve other needs for managing these files. There were some free-to-download apps that solved a lot of these problems but none in quite the right way, and a lot of them looked fairly sketchy. I don't really have any intention of distributing the software I wrote because it's so specific to her needs, and at best I might throw it up somewhere so I have the source backed up, as every once in awhile she asks for something new to add to this program.

philangist 7y ago
Wow this is awesome. Who said programmers aren't romantic?
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Reminds me of the QueryStorm story; apparently the project started because the author wanted to help his girlfriend with her work (which involved lots of data and Excel files). http://blog.querystorm.com/index.php/2018/04/04/whynow/ http://blog.querystorm.com/index.php/2018/04/04/whynow/

dangoor 7y ago

I exchanged a couple of tweets with Robin about this. I think this app is really cool, and I didn't want to get nerdsniped, but it seems to me that this could be built using webapis today. So you could have a cross-platform compatible version that doesn't require code signing, etc. That would be really nice. Got me thinking how cool it would be if there was then an easy way for anyone to instantiate a copy for their own family. They own the data, they just pay for what little they use of S3 and lambda.

danfang 7y ago

This resonated with my own personal experience building a messaging app for my closest friends and family. It's been a steady 8-12 daily active users for the past few months. I'll probably write a blog post in the future about what it does and why we use it. I'm also considering open sourcing the entire project! https://get.thread-app.com/ https://get.thread-app.com/

petejodo 7y ago
I've been wanting an app like that for awhile now. I started messing around prototyping something like that around planning events with others. I'm excited to see what more of this!!

gorgoiler 7y ago

I absolutely love this comparison. Making computers do what you want using a core set of skills, personal taste, some equipment, and a set of reference works is absolutely analogous to cooking at home for the family. I feel a bit like this touches on operating systems as well. After a decade with macOS — away from Debian, ion3, evince, Firefox, and to some extent the command line — I get that same feeling of overexposure one might feel after eating out for every meal. Restaurant food is polished and diverse but it’s overly tasty and the options for customization are coarse (no pun intended.) You can choose a dish but not how it’s made. The analogy with home cooking makes me want to go back to a computing environment where I get to put the ingredients together that work best for me even if it isn’t something that’s perfect enough to sell to other people. Hackable window managers aren’t the be all and end all but they are a good example of what I’m talking about. Time to buy that $100 Thinkpad, I guess.

teddyh 7y ago

Now, some of you may not ever write computer programs, but perhaps you cook. And if you cook, unless you're really great, you probably use recipes. And, if you use recipes, you've probably had the experience of getting a copy of a recipe from a friend who's sharing it. And you've probably also had the experience — unless you're a total neophyte — of changing a recipe. You know, it says certain things, but you don't have to do exactly that. You can leave out some ingredients. Add some mushrooms, 'cause you like mushrooms. Put in less salt because your doctor said you should cut down on salt — whatever. You can even make bigger changes according to your skill. And if you've made changes in a recipe, and you cook it for your friends, and they like it, one of your friends might say, “Hey, could I have the recipe?” And then, what do you do? You could write down your modified version of the recipe and make a copy for your friend. These are the natural things to do with functionally useful recipes of any kind. Now a recipe is a lot like a computer program. A computer program's a lot like a recipe: a series of steps to be carried out to get some result that you want. So it's just as natural to do those same things with computer programs — hand a copy to your friend. Make changes in it because the job it was written to do isn't exactly what you want. It did a great job for somebody else, but your job is a different job. And after you've changed it, that's likely to be useful for other people. Maybe they have a job to do that's like the job you do. So they ask, “Hey, can I have a copy?” Of course, if you're a nice person, you're going to give a copy. That's the way to be a decent person. — Richard Stallman, 2001 (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.html)

Joe-Z 7y ago
Sounds nice, except programming is difficult and akin to magic for most people. Achieving what‘s proposed here, namely wanting to get a job done, but your requirements for it are different from how your friend uses it, is usually achieved by having a program that takes a lot of configuration parameters and then does the job according to them. IMO that‘s the more fitting analogy.
- learnstats2 7y ago
  but... that type of program doesn't exist. Most (non-technical) people settle for using software that isn't really designed for their use case. Non-technical people use a lot of magical hacking to make things work approximately how they want.

eandre 7y ago

I really appreciate the approach of building something simple (in user experience but also in implementation). These days it's so easy to get sucked in and end up spending months setting up Kubernetes clusters and the "that won't scale"-type thinking.

ricg 7y ago

A while back I came to realize that not every app I produce (I'm an Indie Mac/iOS dev) has to be polished and App Store-ready. I can write an app for an audience of one - me. Getting an app ready for an App Store easily adds 50% of development time. A home-cooked app can have hard coded values (oh yeah!), doesn't have to be pretty (although it's more fun), doesn't have to support all platforms (no, I won't add Apple Watch support!), it just has to work for me. My latest project: a little iOS app that I can use at a bookstore to scan the book's barcode and then checks if that book is available at my local public library. When I showed that to my SO she was amazed and said: "And you just made THAT?". Well, yes. My secret superpower is that I can make these little computers that we all keep in our pockets these days make anything I want them to. A few other projects that I made for myself over the years: - App that generates PDF invoices from my App Store financial reports (I simply paste in the plain text from the website) - A break timer app (old one was 32bit-only, I didn't bother to download a new one) - Text snippet app: it scans an email for the senders name and pre-populates possible answers. I turned this into a tiny CRM that keeps track of feature requests and whom I sent an update. This is actually in the App Store, but was a huge commercial failure, but I use this myself e v e r y day. - Quick click: it's like a command line for my Mac. I type something I see on the screen (e.g. the title of a button), the app highlights possible matches, I press Return and the app sends a simulated mouse click. I can also use this as a window manager to resize the active app, because, why not? For personal use: - Portfolio simulator app that calculates every possible IRR for a given number of years (once I was done I discovered portfoliocharts.com, well...) - Portfolio tracker app to track my retirement savings: this is like a tiny spreadsheet app only that it's fed by 3 csv files (orders.csv, transactions.csv, asses prices.csv). "editing" is done in VIM. The app generates various reports that I use to check if I'm on track with my savings. - Simple stock checker app (fetches the prices of a, yes, hard-coded list of ticker symbols). - App to categorize my spendings. Input is a csv file (I like plain text). I wanted to learn now Naive Bayes filtering works and have to say, seeing the app do its thing is as close to magic as I ever got. - Time lapse screen recorder: creates a screenshot every x seconds. I used this once to record a video of how I'm developing an app. - Custom implementation of Unshaky (with more stats and settings) to fix the double-space keypress issue of my new MacBook Air - Alarm clock app that uses the accelerometer to wake me when I'm not in a deep sleep phase. And a few more that I don't use anymore...

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DaveSapien 7y ago

"Home-cooked" software is such a perfect analogy to indie game development. It resonates with me much more that other terms like "full stack", "Dev ops", and so on. It nicely removes the guilt of not writing the perfect codebase, as we often have to sacrifice that in order to ship a game. For me indie games might not be the michelin star earners some of the time, but they warm the stomach. With imperfect charm they offer the delightful experiences just like home cooked patisserie. (edit formatting)

Zanneth 7y ago

My brother and I built an app together that is only used by the two of us. It’s a simple way to keep a shared ledger between the two of us because we split a lot of expenses as roommates. We’ve been using it almost every day for about 10 months now. In a way it’s different from the author’s app because our app is over-engineered in some pointless but extremely fun ways. It’s also similar in that it will: - Never break unexpectedly due to an unwanted app update - Never spy on us and steal our personal information - Look and behave exactly the way we want it to, and no other way I highly recommend building an app in this way. For me it reminded me what I love about programming, and allows me to work on a project unhindered by meetings, project managers, or deadlines. Just like cooking something for yourself, it can be as perfect or as imperfect as you want it to be, as well as an exercise in self-expression.

hamidul 7y ago

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