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Craft software that makes people feel something
- ranger_danger 10mo agoLove the mouse cursor, it made me feel happy.
- PaulHoule 10mo agoLove how the mouse trail effect is using O(1) memory no matter how fast you move the mouse so it won't blow up your browser.
- queuebert 10mo agoGenuine question: What else would it do? The mouse trail is a history of coordinates, so that should be linear, right?
- beanjuiceII 10mo agorage after moving my mouse on that site...great work !
- deadbabe 10mo agoDread is a feeling.
- PTOB 10mo agoIn so far as it makes me feel the relief, awe, and pleasure of picking up a good tool, then by all means. The mouse trail made me feel something else.
- torginus 10mo agoThe title sounds like the Chinese curse of software development. Fun tidbit: Just to make sure I got it right, I quickly googled the phrase. Gemini's elaboration on the topic truly made me feel something. Gemini's answer: A "Chinese curse" often refers to the phrase "May you live in interesting times," though it's not actually Chinese but a misinterpreted English saying, while actual Chinese curses involve direct insults like "Cào nǐ mā" (Fuck your mother(sic!))
- mmooss 10mo agoGemini conflates two meanings of 'curse'. One is a quasi-ritulistic invocation of some power to change the object's fate. The other is intentionally rude, transgressive words used to attack or humiliate.
- amelius 10mo agoI don't know what the article was about because I got distracted, but the mouse animation looks great!
- ghjv 10mo agohabitually move my cursor while reading things... so Feels Bad for sure
- Minor49er 10mo ago> When programming becomes repetitive, the odds of you creating something that makes people go “wow” are reduced quite a bit. Unless you're working on something with a lot of breadth, of course. A great example is yt-dlp which works on a huge number of sites. The wow-factor is high because it feels like it just works everywhere. That's only possible through a huge number of data parsers, many of which are not terribly different from one another
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- crumpled 10mo agoLooks like they disabled the mouse effect thing everyone is talking about, for the articles. So if you want to see it, go to the homepage of the site.
- aeblyve 10mo agoI find that the software that evinces a feeling of admiration in me is itself as devoid of feeling as possible, RE the observation that aesthetics are created out of pure functionality. The more "sentimental" or "egotistical" a piece of software is in itself, the less I like it. Taken to the limit, the title of the article commands us to generate Skinner boxes to maximize user engagement etc.
- jrm4 10mo agoI don't think it's too reductive to suggest that what you're liking is also "a feeling," just a different one than you were thinking about?
- aeblyve 10mo agoI think that would be too reductive. The objective productive factors of software are what give it actual value. The author could have chosen to write "produce useful software", but did not.
- pedrozieg 10mo agoThere’s something refreshing about explicitly saying “this editor exists to delight me, and that’s enough”. The default script now is that every side project should either be open-sourced or turned into a SaaS, even if that pressure is exactly what kills the weirdness that made it interesting in the first place. Some of the best tools I’ve used felt like they started as someone’s private playground that only later got hardened into “serious” software. Letting yourself park Boo, go build a language, and come back when it’s fun again is probably how we get more Rio/Boo-style experiments instead of yet another VS Code skin with a growth deck attached.
- mghackerlady 10mo agoI'm very much for people open-sourcing their projects in terms of releasing the source code. Just don't accept patches or whatever, keep the repos closed
- mirashii 10mo agoUnfortunately, and I think to great overall harm, GitHub does not let you disable many of the collaboration features. I was just having a discussion today with someone who would be fine open sourcing their code, but is uninterested in any contributions, questions, or community interaction. Since GitHub won’t allow that, their options are to host it somewhere themselves where nobody will see it, or just don’t publish it, which is ultimately what happened.
- matheusmoreira 10mo ago> GitHub does not let you disable many of the collaboration I wish they'd allow making issues and pull requests sponsor only. Could enable a business model.
- Yokohiii 10mo agoIt's weird that this thread argues to keep the fun in hobby projects and you ask for the exact opposite.
- Xenoamorphous 10mo agoKinda tangential but in the advent of AI I feel like there won’t be a niche for “handcrafted software”. When quartz watches came up the makers of mechanical watches struggled. Quartz watches are cheaper, more accurate in many cases and servicing is usually restricted to replacing a battery. However some people appreciate a good mechanical watch (and the status symbol aspect of course) and nowadays the mechanical watch market is flourishing. Something similar happened with artificial fabrics (polyester, acrylic) and cheap made clothes, there’s a market for handmade clothes that use natural fabrics. Nobody (well, barring a few HN readers) will ever care if the software was written by people or a bot, as long as it works.
- davidivadavid 10mo agoSo the proof for your claim is two counterexamples?
- ares623 10mo agoI believe OP’s intent was that for software, normal users don’t see or understand what’s under the hood so how the software is built doesn’t matter.
- Xenoamorphous 10mo agoExactly. I thought my last paragraph made it clear that software is not like the other couple of things.
- davidivadavid 10mo agoThe point is that "normal users" don't care about niche hobbies in general either.
- tuveson 10mo agoOr maybe it's like someone saying homecooked meals and professional chefs are outdated because McDonalds exists. Homecooked meals are cheaper and healthier, and professional chefs still make better food. I don't think McDonalds is about to disappear, but I'm pretty sure those other categories aren't about to become obsolete any time soon.
- swader999 10mo agoI think with tools like Claude code you can more easily tackle niche areas that would benefit from custom crafted features and then using the app would feel like it was purpose built for the specific task at hand. Sure the code might not look hand crafted, but if it works and solves problems in the world...
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- dzink 10mo agoThat was the thought when I designed https://dianazink.com https://dianazink.com
- militanz 10mo agoVery interesting, I learnt Rust for the same reason: having fun doing something that I need and learning new things in the process. Good luck for your new project!
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- imiric 10mo ago> I don’t really feel I need to follow people’s cake recipe for success. That's great, but then what's the point of this article? The author is seemingly offering advice about why and how software should be built, but then claims to not follow anyone else's advice. Cool. Just do whatever makes you happy. If you want to work on proprietary editors and programming languages, go ahead. I would argue that doing that in the open would both improve the projects and make the world a better place, far more than blogging about them does, but this doesn't matter if you're optimizing for personal happiness.
- ozim 10mo agoYeah I make software that makes people feel something - rage - there are 2 types of software one that no one cares about and software that people use and voice their opinions about :)
- elcritch 10mo agoI was looking for this comment. For example Microsoft Teams and Office 365 make me feel something, but it’s not joy.
- mghackerlady 10mo agoI feel bad for the poor souls that are forced to work on software like that. It surely can't be fun
- logicchains 10mo agoThey might be sadists having the time of their lives. There are few better opportunities in life to get away consequence free with causing pain to a huge amount of people, than working on Microsoft Teams. Not only get away with it consequence free; they're even getting paid for it!
- mcny 10mo agoI have not met a single softie who defended the decision to make ctrl shift c the shortcut to start a call in a group chat when ctrl shift v is paste unformatted. Especially given that the teams client doesn't allow disabling or editing keyboard shortcut. Microsoft employees may be lazy but unlike Facebook employees (I refuse to call it meta), I don't think they are evil.
- wyre 10mo agoH1-B visas? Their alternative surely isn't better.
- vineyardmike 10mo agoI never worked at MSFT, but I did work on a few extremely popular consumer-facing products across big tech that had a negative reputation. One product was super hated feature of a bigger and well-loved service (literally "why can't I turn this off") and the other was perceived to be super useful but poor-quality. I think I can understand the experience of those MSFT employees. They know the reputation, and they're sorry, but they need to work, and everyone fights with the product team. At the former, I started right after school and was baffled no one I worked with ever used our product. I found it super demoralizing to build something so heavily used but unpopular, and eventually I quit out of frustration. I tried to change the product, and improve features, and frequently met with our product and UX people to no avail. We existed, of course, because sometimes popular free products need to serve business goals (thankfully not ads at least). At the latter, we just had the challenge of building a complicated product, and with millions of users, you'll always get complaints. I had coworkers who would check reddit every morning and share all the complaints people had and really took it to heart. Of course, we could never properly debug or do anything for these random users, and "at scale" a 0.00001% error rate still meant a lot of disappointed people. It was still pretty demoralizing after a while but at least we could say people found us useful, even if it wasn't "fun".
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- smm11 10mo agoCircus Ponies Notebook. That was a look into a world we steered away from.
- ChrisMarshallNY 10mo agoI love that essay. I tend to do things the same way. I write software that I want to use. I do tend to go "all the way," though. Making it ship-Quality, releasing it on the App Store, providing supporting Web documentation, etc. Makes me feel good to do it. I always used to say "My dream is to work for free." Livin' the dream...
- ZebusJesus 10mo agoBoo is an interesting name for an editor what feature were you looking to make that others didn't have? I like your website by the way, the blue square that turns the mouse cursor into a tracer is a neat effect and makes interacting with your content fun!
- jesse__ 10mo ago> created solely for myself; I never had the intention of making it [...] mainstream This is a habit I picked up from two people I respect greatly as programmers; Casey Muratori and Jonathan Blow. Those guys both built their own little lands; Jon went as far as building a new language, a 3D game engine in that language, and has multiple game titles in-flight in the engine. I have a handful of projects that are similar in spirit. I'm largely the only, and target, user of these projects. It's joyful to work in an environment you control completely. No deadlines, no feature requests, no support tickets, no garbage collector, no language runtime .. just me and the OS having a party.
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- mmooss 10mo ago> Those guys both built their own little lands Do you mean they created their own fictional geographic worlds (or parts of worlds)? That's amazing. Many - including Tolkien, I think - have started that way. Sometimes, the world finds out about it. Robert Louis Stevenson started with a map.
- jesse__ 10mo agoHah, I should have been more specific. They created programming environments that are entirely their own. Although Jon has created several games which include fictional geographic worlds.
- bodhi_mind 10mo agoI’m stuck on the opening sentence. Family went to sleep in the morning so rest of the day is free? I must be missing something but that doesn’t make sense. Did the author chloroform them?
- apsurd 10mo agobabies? nap time?
- munificent 10mo agoI think English isn't their first language. I believe they mean "are still asleep".
- Uehreka 10mo agoThat wouldn’t make sense either. They said it was the afternoon, and that they now had the whole day free, the sentence wouldn’t make sense if you swapped “went to sleep” for “are still asleep”. There must be some weird timezone thing that the author expects us to know about them already.
- trashface 10mo agoI've done this, but the product I made is prohibited by the terms of service of the application it works with, and that industry is litigious and authoritarian. So I'm never going to release it, or even talk about it.
- devinprater 10mo agoEmacs and Emacspeak make me feel something. A lot of something. This kind of "playground" feeling where I can dive into a manual that's just sitting right there. The the entire Emacs is a manual. C-h m and boom, all keyboard commands for that mode are right, feaking, there. No hidden bullcrap, no patchwork HTML tables to drudge through, nothing. And if something doesn't work with Emacspeak, I can Codex it into working. Maybe. Enough to get what I want done, done.
- css_apologist 10mo agoi remember making the switch from atom to vscode felt so cold i can’t explain what, it wasn’t just the colour scheme atom was objectively worse on performance and a few other things i forget, but it felt so good to use
- mmooss 10mo ago> created solely for myself; I never had the intention of making it [...] mainstream This is how many artists have worked. They make something for themself, and one day they show it to someone else ... or they just get the urge to share it more widely, often without the hope that anyone will really be interested. Or they keep it for themself. I think Tolkien is in that group, for example. But don't get the wrong idea from an extreme outlier: much of the time, others aren't interested, or not many are. Sometimes, nobody is interested until after you've forgotten about it or passed away. Who cares? That's one reason you need to make it for yourself. Also, I think that otherwise it provides much less expression and insight into another person, which is at the core of art. There is a fundamental human need to 'externalize the imagination'.
- alsetmusic 10mo agoSeveral years ago, I wrote an angry email to loved ones about something I’d seen in national news (USA) about my city. A friend replied saying that he thought I should submit it to a local paper. Ended up as an op-ed. Not a major claim to fame, but I was still pleased that someone cared enough about my words to publish.
- nospice 10mo ago> This is how many artists have worked. They make something for themself, and one day they show it to someone else That model depended on personal wealth or (more often) patronage. Because the supply of wealthy patrons was limited, it meant that you had fewer artists pursuing their visions. Everyone else needed to find menial jobs. Now, we democratized access to patronage, but it means that to support yourself, you need to deliver what gets you the most clicks, not what your soul craves. I sort of wish we still had both models, but I think that wealthy patrons have gone out of fashion in favor of spending money on crypto and AI.
- eikenberry 10mo ago> That model depended on personal wealth or (more often) patronage. "They make something for themself, .." For the vast majority of people this means doing it on the side, in addition to their day-job. I've known a lot of artists in my time and we all have day jobs. You do art for yourself because you love to create, not expecting to make any significant money on it.
- tarkin2 10mo agoMaking people something for software rather than helping them interact healthily with real people in their surroundings feels irresponsible at this point in time, given all the damage social media, short form videos, and the rest have done to the world at large.
- jamesgill 10mo agoI agree with the title, but disagree with this: "When programming becomes repetitive, the odds of you creating something that makes people go “wow” are reduced quite a bit. It isn’t a rule, of course. You need to be inspired to make inspiring software." The purpose of software for other people is not to make them go 'wow'; it's to help them with their jobs to be done. That's it. The software is always in service to the job the user wants to get done. Can that make them go 'wow'? Sure, but you can't..aim for 'wow'. That's the wrong goal. As far as 'inspiration' goes, I'm with Stephen King: "Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us just get up and go to work." For those that might disagree (hey, it's HN), I would ask: how do you know when 'wow' occurs? Here's a clue: 'wow' can only happen when something else occurs first. That 'something else' is described above.
- robin_reala 10mo agoThat’s overly reductive. You’re making a CRUD app? Absolutely. You’re programming a new effect for a laser setup in a club? Less so.
- bandofthehawk 10mo agoEven in the case of a CRUD app, I think it's not bad to aim for a wow. Like "with this new feature, I'll no longer need to do x, y, and z repetitive tasks, great!"
- 9rx 10mo ago> The purpose of software for other people is not to make them go 'wow'; it's to help them with their jobs to be done. Aside from where you've only duplicated something that already exists (in which case why bother?), what kind of software would you be able to create to help me do my job that wouldn't also make me go 'wow'? Any part of my job that I lack tools to help me with are the parts that seem impossible to have the tools for, so when you defy that understanding, 'wow' is inevitable.
- Yokohiii 10mo ago> Aside from where you've only duplicated something that already exists (in which case why bother?) If we had stopped reiterating on the wheel our cars would drive on wooden logs.
- barrenko 10mo agoCraft software that makes you feel something.
- runtimepanic 10mo agoThe Zelda example is a good reminder that emotion in software often comes from consistency and responsiveness. Those games feel immersive because the underlying systems behave predictably, inputs map cleanly to actions, and the world reacts without friction. That same principle applies to non-game software too: tight feedback loops and coherent internal rules make tools feel “alive” in a way users notice even if they can’t articulate it.
- flemins 10mo agoDoes anger count?
- rkomorn 10mo agoNot if you want to stand out from the crowd.
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- brailsafe 10mo agoThis is what my nostalgia for native macos editors rests on. I've wanted to buy Coda despite VSCode and other derivatives being more productive, and where would editors now be without BBEdit, Textmate, Espresso/CSS Edit, which all did particular things very well, given the constraints at the time.
- socalgal2 10mo agoLots of software is crafted to make me feel rage
- hulitu 10mo agoCrafted ? More like: if it compiles, ship it.
- fuzzfactor 10mo agoI would say both, but socalgal is one of those who are sensitive to this. The business plan seems to often be one of fomenting rage with plenty of people not feeling like it is happening at all.
- nchmy 10mo agoJIRA makes people feel something
- hellorashid 10mo agocase in point: the lil mouse-snakey-animation-thing on your homepage is excessively satisfying and making me feel lots of things
- mulquin 10mo agoI found it cute until I realised it didn't disappear when you let it finish shrinking, nor if you click the little blue square. Then I found myself annoyed by it and left the page.
- pvtmert 10mo agoThis was one of the best & heartfelt blog posts I have read on the HN so far. I can relate because of 2 things; 1. I also played a lot of legos during my childhood & loved it. 2. I have a similar "preference" on configurations & shell-profile. (ie. overall setup) At work, I am the only person who has a personal configuration & automation package (ie. dotfiles) at my director's level organization. (Maybe there is another one or two at most) Not only that, I also have a nearly complete automation to provision a new machine, virtual or otherwise using the same code. (usually maintained by make && make install) I update things regularly. It has bunch of "utility" scripts. As it being a $FAANG company, once in a while, here and there, people stumble on scripts/solutions/docs (also markdown). There were even occasional CRs (code-reviews / pull-requests) I received.
- godelski 10mo ago> Craft software that makes people feel something Meta, Google, and all of FAANG already did that. They crafted software that made people feel hate, anger, depression, but sometimes joy. It's nice to get those cute animal posts when doom scrolling. It's a nice break from "you're all going to die", "everyone is dumb except you", and "you're powerless". Joking aside, I do very much agree with the OP. But I also wanted to note how things can get perverted. Few people are actually evil and most evil people get there slowly. What's that old cliché that everyone forgets? "The road to hell is paved with good intentions". The point is to constantly check that you're on the right path and realize that most evil is caused in the pursuit of good because good is difficult to do. But also I wanted to share a Knuth quote | In fact what I would like to see is thousands of computer scientists let loose to do whatever they want. That’s what really advances the field - Donald Knuth I am fully with him on this. It is the same reason Bell Labs had so much success. How do you manage a bunch of geniuses?[0]. You don't. You let experts explore. They already know the best ways forward. Many will fail, but that's okay. In CS one of the biggest problems we have is that we try to optimize everything, but we're also really bad at math. If you want to optimize search over a large solution space with a highly parallelized processor you create a distribution. It's good to have that mean but you need the tails too and that's what we lose. You tighten the distribution when you need focus on a specific direction but then relax it to go back to exploration. But what we do, is we like railroads. We like to try to carry all the groceries from the car in one trip. We like to go fast, but don't really care where. We love to misquote Knuth about premature optimization to justify our laziness and ignore his quotes about being detail oriented and refining solutions. I think progress has slowed down. And I think it's because we stopped exploring. We're afraid to do anything radical, and that's a shame [0] Knuth has another quote about programmers not being geniuses lol
- fuzzfactor 10mo agoMy saying is that if you want to be able to herd cats, you need to be cat yourself. That can require so much experience most people could never imagine it could be accomplished at all. But if so, you could then herd geniuses, as long as they were also cats :) When you single-handedly have to cover a lot of bases, you do what you have to do.
- thiagovsdiniz 10mo agoI was missing Rapha news since he left social media
- nextworddev 10mo agoSoftware… is not where I turn to feel something
- imploded_sub 10mo agoReacting mostly on the title, not the article about software as art/hobby, most software I interact with makes me feel something. Mostly rage, occasionally despair. There has been cases of pleasure or delight, but those are so rare they basically don't count. Edit: also lots of confusion.
- vasco 10mo agoThe guys at palantir really took this to heart
- kazinator 10mo agoWindows 11 makes people feel something. No, not like that.
- nottorp 10mo ago> Craft software that makes people feel something You can easily induce rage by shipping it full of bugs :)
- Schlagbohrer 10mo ago"So, I woke up today. Got my coffee, family went to sleep, and I have a free afternoon." What kind of schedule or different timezone does this author have with their family? I am trying to imagine a family that either goes to bed in the early afternoon or a person who wakes up in the evening to start their day.
- leoedin 10mo agoHis other hobby is anaesthesia? Maybe a young child that naps in the day? That doesn’t really give a whole free afternoon though. 2 hours at best.
- a96 10mo agoOr family is the cat.
- eps 10mo agoSpain probably. Their siestas are as legendary as they are mandatory :)
- baxtr 10mo agoThat is weird enough. But also the fact that he seems to be celebrating that is odd. Avoiding to spend time with your family shouldn’t be something you enjoy.
- wkjagt 10mo agoIt can be both. You can enjoy family time, and still be happy with alone time. I love getting up at 5 am, when everyone is still asleep and the house is still quiet. But I also love spending time with the family once everyone's day starts. Both are possible.
- i_am_a_peasant 10mo agowanting time away from your loved ones doesn't seem the least bit weird to me. Like sure you love your wife and kids, but being with them every second of every day is probably too much for most sane people. Especially if you have hobbies that demand a lot of focus time.
- rpigab 10mo agoThat's how I feel about my commandline Solitaire game (gitlab.com/rpigab/solitaire-cli, playable on Gitlab pages with an AZERTY or QWERTY keyboard), I'm the end user, I like playing it and making it, but that's about it!
- superice 10mo agoIn the best case scenario, professionally writing software is treated like a craft. You produce something useful while applying your skills, with the tools at your disposal. You can write software as an art form, just like woodworking can be both a craft and an art form. A woodworker in an assembly line doing the same thing over and over again to me is not a craftsperson, it is the attitude towards the job that makes it art, craft, or assembly line work. Too many software projects treat programmers as factory workers, where their primary value is measured in amount of storypoints or Jira tickets finished. Don't get me wrong, you can be a craftsperson and use an issue tracker ofcourse, but if quantity is the only thing management cares about instead of quality, the craft gets lost in the process. Quantity is easy to measure, quality is not. At the same time treating software like an art is probably not very useful. That code is (typically) not written to be looked at, but to make the computer do something useful. It's a shame artisinal software sounds so weird, because that precisely describes the level of caring I'd like to see applied to the software I use.
- teacpde 10mo ago> At the same time treating software like an art is probably not very useful. That code is (typically) not written to be looked at, but to make the computer do something useful. FWIW you can argue the same for woodworking, a chair is typically not made to be looked at but for people to sit on. I tired to think what inherently makes writing software treated less than a craft than woodworking, but couldn’t think of any.
- agumonkey 10mo agodepends on the kind of software, the visuals are part of the ux and ergonomics. ratio, spacing, how to convey state with just the right amount of visual cues. a chair is not a tool your interact with to create. now there are some software that is like this, you want to start it and forget about it as long as it does its thing while you think about your goal.
- fuzzfactor 10mo agoSometimes with software the reat art has nothing to do with anything the user sees.
- hulitu 10mo ago> Craft software that makes people feel something We have Microsoft, Google, Apple. This is enough pain. We don't need more.
- lionkor 10mo agoSnarky reply but most software today makes me feel very strong feelings :'(
- dormento 10mo agoI see node_modules I get angry. Also, anything electron induces a strong sense of "where did we go wrong?" Also, mobile-ish interfaces on desktops. Ugh!
- fuzzfactor 10mo agoI know what you mean. Before the iPhone came out, mobile used to handle desktop websites better than desktops handle lots of modern sites now.
- lionkor 10mo agoI think sharing software as free and open source should not be primarily about success, fame, money, or anything of the sort. It's about sharing knowledge and experience with the world. It does not cost you anything to put your code on the internet; you don't need to use something like GitHub. You can just publicize a tarball. Its about sharing and giving, which is fundamentally not about you. When people ask you to open source, they most likely want to learn and build on it.
- harimau777 10mo agoDoes feeling anger count? If so, then Google search is nailing that!
- moi2388 10mo agoLike Microsoft, who continues to craft software which makes me feel anger.