An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

This is poetry. I have been working on a personal project for the last 10 years that replaces every other app I used to use - E-mail, calendar, and all the others we all use on a daily basis - and every time someone sees me using it they ask &quot;Wow, this is amazing, how do I download it!?&quot;, and the answer is always the same: you don&#x27;t.<p>There&#x27;s a beauty to engineering something having yourself as the target user, and no one else. I&#x27;m 100% convinced this project single-handedly keep my mental wellbeing in check, and it provides me with a constant source of hopefulness and happiness to the future - that no company&#x2F;salary could ever offer me. My exclusive, differential, unique characteristic against the world, my joker card.

Great read! This reminds me of a macOS app I made for my wife a few years back. It keeps track of the opening hours of all her favorite shops, and she can click a menu bar icon to see how long until each one closes today. It also warns if it&#x27;s currently peak&#x2F;rush hour for the shop, since she prefers to go when it&#x27;s less crowded.<p>It&#x27;s a simple Qt app that uses a text file for data storage. I wrote it after noticing that she had trouble remembering which shops are open when. I asked her what to call it, and she said &quot;Gladiolus, like the flower&quot; so I named it Gladiolus.<p>I can say for sure I&#x27;ve never had a more appreciative client as a programmer than the one user of Gladiolus :^)

&gt; In our actual world, I built it in about a week, and roughly half of that time was spent wrestling with different flavors of code-signing and identity provisioning and I don’t even know what. I burned some incense and threw some stones and the gods of Xcode allowed me to pass.<p>This resonated with me.<p>This is a major source of friction to &quot;scratching your own itch&quot; in modern software development. Makes it extremely painful to get started. And runs against an engineering mindset, as it&#x27;s not understanding principles of computing or composing components in a sensible way to build a useful new thing. It&#x27;s just banging your head spamming incantations found through Google until something finally works.

This post significantly influenced me back when it was first on HN, and helped me articulate what I was already doing subconsciously.<p>I started a homelab years ago like a lot of folks here, and slowly that’s changed to being a hobby of building and selfhosting applications for my “users” of 5-15 of my family and closest friends.<p>I’ve written so many little apps for them (e.g movie night scheduler) and integrations into our group chat for whatever someone can think of. It’s really blossomed into something that has made us all talk and hang out so much more.<p>Even distant friend groups that don’t know each other have now met in person (without me!) and gone to baby showers, weddings, etc.<p>If anyone has a group of friends like that, consider making something for them!

At the same time, I feel the gap is widening between these and professional apps. It&#x27;s easier to write apps, and it&#x27;s harder to write &quot;real&quot; apps (for the masses).<p>I&#x27;m writing a book (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opinionatedlaunch.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opinionatedlaunch.com</a>) over the course of 3+ years and I have to keep updating the &quot;Mobile&quot; chapters. Not because of some fancy new framework, but because both Apple and Google keep adding &quot;requirements.&quot;<p>Sure, they&#x27;re for the better (e.g. more strict access to phone GPS, etc) but if you don&#x27;t keep up, eventually you&#x27;ll find your apps removed by the platform at some point in time. In this sense, there&#x27;s no &quot;done&quot;.<p>You probably can still distribute that little program you wrote in 1990 in Pascal. I don&#x27;t know the equivalent for mobile apps. (Distribute, not run. You can run it easily on your old phones).

This post changed my mind about sideloading on iPhones. Before I read it I was firmly in the camp of “lock it down, so grandma doesn’t get hacked.” But now I just think it stops people from making home cooked meal apps like this.<p>I also think it propagates the notion that computers are magic and should only be programmed by magicians. But no software developer I have ever met has felt this way. I don’t feel this way.

Your writeup, the idea of the app, and how you executed it is a breath of fresh air. The idea of building for a TAM (total addressable market) that is in single digits is a nice contrast to pretty much everything that&#x27;s out there. Such an app is one step higher than a learning project, with oodles of utility, albeit for one or a few people. But those are the most important people in your life, so its much more fulfilling!<p>Comparing it to cooking a meal at home for your family is a perfect analogy.

Lovely idea. I’ve been thinking of “small scale web things” a lot recently, as I’ve been growing more and more tired of the planet scale web. I live in a small village in Canada and it would be nice to have something “village scale” that is only of interest, and as such perfectly adapted to only our village. Because it’s so small scale (we’re only a couple thousand), it can run on something in my closet. If it goes down for some reason, there’s no being angry with some large corporation behind it because it’s just me, and we mostly all know (of) each other here. If it’s temporarily down because or a power outage (which happens quite regularly here, especially during snow storms), even that will feel local: there’s a good chance users will have the same power outage. I’m probably being idealist and I’ll never do anything like this. Part of me also knows that most people will just continue using Facebook groups etc anyway.

&gt; I burned some incense and threw some stones and the gods of Xcode allowed me to pass.<p>Gave an audible chuckle at this one. I&#x27;ve done many a battle with those gods; they be beasts.

This is great.<p>I have a little internal app for my company. Just an isolated Rails app. It touches no internal business systems, but whenever I need somewhere to put a little code - it goes there. It has my growth chart, a little search engine for some internal data, a couple scripts to remind me about recurring actions, and some random integration tools like an RSS-&gt;Email script for the blog.<p>I recommend everybody just have a &quot;miscellaneous&quot; app separate from customer data for non-core code. Having a low barrier to building fun things liberates the mind. Not all code has to be high-stakes business work.

I love writing bespoke software! My little bonus Christmas gift to my parents this year was a kind of Jeopardy clone that uses a dataset of questions from thousands of shows.<p>Watching Jeopardy is a new nightly tradition, but they always complained that they wish they could see the category when the clue is on screen, which is what inspired the project. It’s a full screen PWA and my mom likes to mirror her phone screen to their smart TV to play. There’s no score tracking or sound effects or “multiplayer” because it’s made for the way they like to play.<p>Of course, I can’t distribute it publicly either for copyright reasons, but I wouldn’t want to anyway.

This reminds me of my app &quot;Delayed&quot; which I started writing when Android phones were new, and I was commuting by train in Stockholm, Sweden. I worked about a 2 minute walk from the train platform, but I still wanted to know if they were delayed, also I wanted to avoid the proprietary platforms&#x27; slowness. I wanted to be able keep working until I knew the train was about to leave.<p>The mobile networks at the times were abysmally slow and unreliable, the API I was using was slow, basically loading times were unacceptable, I needed the info without delay. No, actually pre-fetched even so that it was working even when offline. I ended up scheduling my app using Tasker so that when I was likely commuting it started updating the timetable in the background. Now I always had instant info available, as good as I could at least.<p>Plan was to release the app but I eventually realized I would never polish the app to a releasable state, but it still worked 100% for my exact usecase. So I never did get further than a beta test on the Play Store.

When I first read this post, it helped me decide not to try to adjust my home automation app for the masses.<p>I have a single JavaScript file that runs all the automations in my house. Everything runs on Mqtt and this file handles all timers and temperature adjustments and turning everything off in the house when the right button is pushed and checking that the doors are locked and keeping the front porch lit when the sun is going down and dimming as the sun comes up, and heats my office when I&#x27;m in it and it&#x27;s colder than the rest of my house, but not otherwise, and notifies us when the washer or dryer are done or when it&#x27;s time to change the automated cat litter.<p>Adding a device takes about 5 minutes. Changing a timer takes less. I&#x27;ve ssh&#x27;d in and changed things from my phone when lazy on the couch.<p>The commit history is practically useless. The code isn&#x27;t ideal for a team. It could use a UI. But I love it. And my family is happy with how it all seems to work without much hassle.

This is why I feel really uneasy about LLM&#x2F;AI stuff. It feels like cooking now requires commercial quality equipment only available to the Michelin star restaurants.<p>It used to be possible like showHN posts go on to become smashing success. But Dropbox like posts seem like an impossibility now.<p>I&#x27;ve been having serious mental crisis from this realization.

It is kind of amusing to see this presented as a novel concept. This is how all software development worked once upon a time. Computers used to ship with BASIC interpreters, not app stores or package managers.

Discussed at the time:<p><i>An app can be a home-cooked meal</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22332629">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22332629</a> - Feb 2020 (130 comments)<p>Also:<p><i>An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38856985">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38856985</a> - Jan 2024 (1 comment)<p><i>An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32800518">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32800518</a> - Sept 2022 (51 comments)

I enjoyed the &quot;Colophon&quot; page almost as much as the article<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.robinsloan.com&#x2F;colophon&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.robinsloan.com&#x2F;colophon&#x2F;</a><p>I love the built-in style guide. I&#x27;m totally stealing some ideas from that...

&gt; But let’s substi­tute a different phrase: “learn to cook”. People don’t only learn to cook so they can become chefs. Some do! But many more people learn to cook so they can eat better, or more affordably. Because they want to carry on a tradition. Sometimes they learn because they’re bored! Or even because they enjoy spending time with the person who’s teaching them.<p>This is actually why I think more people should learn some coding (and why there should be more HyperCard-like environments for non-professionals). It makes the computer or phone a tool to do the things <i>they</i> want, not just what some programmer in SF wanted to write and try to market.

&gt; When you liberate programming from the requirement to be professional and scalable, it becomes a different activity altogether, just as cooking at home is really nothing like cooking in a commercial kitchen.<p>What if you have never cooked at home but all the time in a commercial kitchen? That&#x27;s the reality for most of us here so it is a bit difficult to relate to this article.

i recently had to split a lot of transactions among friends. I realized that all the commerical apps out there(splitwise etc) weren&#x27;t gonna split the taxes evenly. So I made my own bill splitting app and have been using it ever since!<p>Another recent app I made happened when I moved into a new apartment. I realized tha the doors were very soundproof so if someone knocked at the main door, there was a good chance I wasn&#x27;t gonna hear it. So I put up a QR Code at the door, pointed it to a webapp and that basically functioned as virtual bell. Where I would get a notification on my iphone and apple watch everytime someone &quot;knocked&quot;!

This feels very related to the larger research project of “malleable software” that lets everyday people modify and author the software they use for their own needs: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;malleable.systems&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;malleable.systems&#x2F;</a><p>My friend Geoffrey Litt is heading the malleable software group at Ink and Switch: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geoffreylitt.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geoffreylitt.com&#x2F;</a>

I do this too, I write scripts, and one-file apps that solve issues that only I think I have. Like I&#x27;ve been running an <i>InternetReachable.swift</i> [1] manually at the CLI for months to have a nice visualization of when my internet connection is not <i>actually</i> working. I travel a lot by train, and some regions have spotty 3G. I got tired of looking at `ping 1.1.1.1` output lines until the connection came back.<p>But for whatever reason I get the urge to polish the thing, make a pretty icon for it and publish it in the hope that others might also have the same weird specific need as me. That script above just turned into an app called IsThereNet : <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lowtechguys.com&#x2F;istherenet" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lowtechguys.com&#x2F;istherenet</a><p>I&#x27;m not sure why, but I get a little dopamine hit when I see people learning a thing or two from my experiments. I guess that&#x27;s why we still do the kind of open source that doesn&#x27;t ask for money.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;alin23&#x2F;e15b6ffc62a85790096f0228c54fd31e" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;gist.github.com&#x2F;alin23&#x2F;e15b6ffc62a85790096f0228c54fd...</a>

&gt; In a better world, I would have built this in a day, using some kind of modern, flexible HyperCard for iOS.<p>How much we have lost.

I love seeing whenever this is (re)posted.<p>This article had such a huge impact on my life and led to me creating many pieces of software[1][2][3] that were hyper-specific to myself and my needs at the time, which also later found an audience in others who think and work in ways similar to me.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;notado.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;notado.app</a> - a &quot;content-first&quot; internet bookmarking and highlighting service which has been my second brain since 2020 after growing frustrated with Instapaper, Pinboard and Readwise. Eventually I expanded this to allow for RSS feed publishing on specific topics in an attempt to solve the &quot;firehose&quot; problem when following other peoples&#x27; bookmarks&#x2F;shares, and at the end of last year I added what is now my most used feature of image generation from highlights for sharing on image-first&#x2F;text-hostile social media platforms.<p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;LGUG2Z&#x2F;komorebi">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;LGUG2Z&#x2F;komorebi</a> - tiling window manager for Windows. There wasn&#x27;t really anything fit for purpose on Windows when I started, and I was too spoiled by bspwm and yabai on Linux and macOS that I just had to write something before I could become a truly productive Windows user. I&#x27;m astonished that this now has 50k+ downloads.<p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kulli.sh" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kulli.sh</a> - I use this to aggregate comments from HN&#x2F;Reddit&#x2F;Lemmy&#x2F;Lobsters on an article I&#x27;m interested in in one place to read. This has helped me find some interesting niche communities on Reddit and Lemmy who share and discuss things I&#x27;m interested in that I otherwise wouldn&#x27;t have found.

I love this sentiment. I built a beer inventory app exclusively for myself + guests picking a drink to try when when they’re over at my house. I’m up to 26 “users” over the past few years, but most of them just browse on my phone when they need another drink.<p>When I talk about the app, some people immediately jump to other inventory problems in their own lives: Can you make it work for my wine fridge? Could I keep track of my kids’ ever-changing wardrobe? I’d love to manage my Warhammer collection this way! It certainly seems like there could be a consumer product to help tackle those problems, but it’s not gonna be my app.<p>Edit: In more of a work context, I think internal tooling for specific users or teams can feel similarly empowering. When you have an intentionally-constrained set of users, finding product-market fit and making sure the solution actually works for their needs becomes the only goal. And with so few users, it’s easy to keep tabs on what is and isn’t working for them.

&gt; Update, February 2022: Two years later, my family still uses BoopSnoop every day. I have added one (1) feature, at my mother’s request.<p>What is that one feature I wonder? Robin, you around to answer?

Nice article and lovely concept. I&#x27;m not a professional dev, but use programming to enrich my quality of life, and it&#x27;s nice to see some of those thoughts put into words.

On the truly lightweight end, I find Apple&#x27;s Shortcuts to be effective for ad-hoc personalized creations. I wanted a simple journaling app which allowed me to just talk, transcribed what I said, and stored it with a timestamp in a text file. Realized I could do all of that quite easily with Shortcuts: I trigger it, talk as long as I want, tap the screen, transcribes (I call an API for better quality), then appends the result to a note with a timestamp. Fast, easy, and it&#x27;s been reliable. No in-app purchases or ads, either.

Nice write up. I like building small apps like this as well, like gigtablet.com which I made for my band to use. It has us 7 users and we’re happy with it so that’s all that matters.

Related &#x27;Ask HN&#x27; that I posted about 3 weeks ago, and that got over 780 comments, with many apps mentioned, which was quite unexpected, but fun:<p>Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use?<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38623695">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38623695</a><p>Still haven&#x27;t checked all the replies with links to their apps, which many gave, but plan to.

Do you still need to pay Apple&#x27;s extortionate $99&#x2F;year developer fee if you&#x27;re only developing apps for private&#x2F;personal use?

Always relevant, always worth reading, but for the two main past discussions here:<p>2020: 556pts, 132 comments &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22332629">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=22332629</a>&gt;<p>2022: 186pts, 51 comments &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32800518">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=32800518</a>&gt;

In order to help unblock everyone from sharing their “home-cooked meal” apps, I’ve submitted an Ask HN to make space for sharing stacks: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38878837">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38878837</a><p>The idea is to allow people to “share ingredients” of internals of projects without the requirement of sharing the code

This is super interesting. Took me until nearly the end, when he started talking about how he wouldn&#x27;t last as a professional software engineer, to find out he isn&#x27;t one.<p>Great way of looking at programming. It really is just another way to create, akin to drawing or writing, and it feels as if we almost desecrate it by treating it the way we do. Inspiring article.

Beautiful! I feel this post is more relevant now than ever with the presence of Chatgpt and its like. Almost anyone who is fluent in English, can articulate what they want and is willing to spend a bit of time configuring development environments can churn out personal projects (falling within state of the art) over a weekend. So lucky to be alive right now.

Love this topic, thanks OP! Many years ago I created an iOS bread dough calculator that basically hard-coded the ingredients in percentage form. I used it personally for years to make pizza crusts, etc. all in a scalable format. Once, my wife and I hosted a big &quot;make your own&quot; pizza party and I used the app to create enough dough for 30 or so personal pizzas.<p>Eventually I pushed it forward (thanks to the Unity Engine at the time) and made it a &quot;real&quot; app on the App Store. As others have noted, there&#x27;s a large gap between bespoke, home-cooked software and commercial choices. As a full-time developer this was a side-project and still suffers, imho, as an under-invested commercial app. The app has had very modest success (pays about the equivalent of one espresso a week) but I still love it.<p>When an app is &quot;just yours&quot; there&#x27;s an aura of fun about the project that can get stripped away when the trajectory becomes more commercial.

Wow, thanks! I read it a long time ago, and later wanted to find this exact article, but couldn&#x27;t.<p>I also have quite a few tools like this, although on another platform (Emacs). I <i>love</i> the whole concept of &quot;home-cooked apps&quot;.<p>And btw, the first project like this I made - for myself and my family - was a database-like app on a Commodore 64 over three decades ago...

I self-host a number of things that I&#x27;ve cobbled together in similar fashion for my kids. A while ago I had a bunch of minecraft servers running, when the kids were more into minecraft. There&#x27;s Vaultwarden, a musescore downloader for my piano-minded kid, a spidered mirror of imgur user ngugi&#x27;s middle-earth lore posts, an Emby instance populated by both random funny videos I find and also by a cron job that mirrors certain youtube (and other) channels locally so that my kids can watch them without being classified by an algorithm...<p>I don&#x27;t publish these things for the most part, each of them took between a few hours and a few days&#x27; worth of spare time to put together, they&#x27;re all made without pretension for an audience of 3-4 people only.

This is an amazingly refreshing view of programming. I am envious of anyone who can apply first hand their programming skills to the world around them. I can program, but real life and programming just seem to occupy entirely different realms of my brain, unable to cross over.

I think this kind taste towards developing your own tools forshadow how programming will look like near future. There won&#x27;t be dozens of abstraction to develop application and there won&#x27;t be a playstore to hold millions of apps, there would be just a declarative language or Ai that takes human natural language and convert it to it and a black box that takes that declarative recipe and create the precise app according to user need. Instead Programmers there would be just a logicans and blackbox(AI system) that created most optimal way to accomplish the requirements. Creating application will be a end to end experience.

This article has been such an inspiration for us at Hatch (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hatch.one&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hatch.one&#x2F;</a>)! We founded the company as “Personal Software” and we’re working hard to lower the barriers for this kind of creation. The opportunity shouldn&#x27;t be limited to people who know how to code. Several pieces of the puzzle are in place with more in the pipleine. Here&#x27;s quick video of getting started creating a web app in 60 seconds: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=HQMFFkCHrdo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=HQMFFkCHrdo</a>

Really happy to see that!<p>One thing I&#x27;m always worried about when I develop one-offs myself is what happens if I&#x27;m not there to service&#x2F;update&#x2F;maintain the thing. For some apps (like family photo archives) this matters a lot.

Really cool. I love that this is a modern rejection of threaded posts, or things that gluttonously try to steal your attention. The choices (irreversibility, privacy, lack of mediation) are the same as what you get if you actually sit in a room with someone and talk.<p>I was quite sure I&#x27;d set it up for myself and family before I read it required AWS .. I wish instead of buckets and lambda functions... well... perhaps it&#x27;s worth replicating the whole thing in Nodejs and sqlite which would be the highest praise of all ;P<p>[edit yeah yeah there&#x27;d have to be a bucket-like storage blob somewhere.&#x2F;&#x2F; or would there?]

I’ve been wanting to make something along this spirit.<p>A personal social network. No influencers. No ads.<p>It rides on existing messaging rails (email, SMS, IM…) for distribution.<p>You just post stuff to your feed, and your contacts get a notification when appropriate.

Not very home cooked, but once I was working on a project&#x2F;startup of mine that involved tracking degrees of freedom&#x2F;trajectories and it was very manual&#x2F;empirical testing, so I made a second app that would plot everything for me in real time, receiving data via socket. This was before iOS had any AR frameworks and just as Metal was released. Nothing existed to test AR, so I made it myself, with my data format, exactly like I wanted it and it was such a quality of life feature.

Robin Sloan is a treasure. His newsletter is also top notch content.

Lovely article and loved the analogy of home cook to making an app. Being a professional programmer who loves programming, I never thought about programming like this. But there is a catch here, I would wager that trying cooking at home is far easier and accessible as compared to making simplest of apps. Most of the no code low-code tools are focused on helping companies make software for their use and not focused on individuals making apps for themselves.

A friend and I recently created an app to track realtime scores for a high school reunion fantasy draft (we drafted teams with a few friends and you get points if the person shows up).<p>With AI helping it really lowers the barrier to personal or one-off apps you wouldn&#x27;t otherwise have time for. We did the app in the framework he was comfortable with, which I hadn&#x27;t used, and I wrote all my code with AI.<p>I got smoked in the game though.

Dated WBM link to the Clay Shirky blog post in the article: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20051129091414&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.shirky.com&#x2F;writings&#x2F;situated_software.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20051129091414&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.shirky...</a><p>Must have been taken down from shirky.com since so WBM&#x27;s last capture is a 404.

Some time ago I took a sudoku app and added some features that I wanted. It was a great learning experience, my code introduced some bugs and it&#x27;s not perfect but the whole thing felt really good.<p>Wish android development was a bit more straightforward, I always find it kind of difficult just because of the amount of things that might go wrong. Kinda like coding videogames I guess.

I always wondered if there would be a market for smaller scale apps. I&#x27;m thinking something sold through an app &quot;farmer&#x27;s market&quot;. This could be a Patreon&#x2F;Etsy style platform where maybe app devs would do streamed live coding or Q&#x2F;A sessions every Saturday morning, ideally wearing denim overalls.

I&#x27;d rather home-cook and take regular walks around the district, than having to spend even more time w&#x2F; tech after for work. Work is already kind of fulfilling, even as a manager, when you still can dabble with lower-level things and tools work. But spending your pasttime on more tech? Thats so sad, seriously.

I can&#x27;t help feeling this is incredibly prescient.<p>Not everyone could be a home cook developer in 2020 .. but in the future, my bet is they will be able to thanks to AI&#x2F;LLM advances.<p>Maybe we should expect (and are due) a total paradigm shift in terms of digital product consumption?

On a much smaller scale:<p>This was my exact sentiment some time ago after remapping a bunch of keys, along with &quot;why didn’t I think of this <i>sooner</i>&quot;.<p>It still feels magical to this day and removes 90% of annoyances when typing.<p>Using standard keyboard layouts is like riding a toy sized tricycle now.

I may have made a very simple app for someone to get around their filter on their laptop....

This is the way, for those of us who have the ability and inclination. Software you create for your own use, and the use of your friends and family, is software that is customized for your particular needs and software that you can trust.

Love this. I recently started working on two apps with this same mindset: I just want to create an app for myself (todo with limits, group chats with content limits). It feels great and is enjoyable even if it doesnt get a million users.

Looking for a software job now, I&#x27;m wondering if I&#x27;m more of a home chef than a commercial cook...But when commercial cooking is fully remote and pays well...what to do...

I know it&#x27;s probably in rough shape but I&#x27;d like to use this myself, even if it takes a lot of code to modify. I guess I&#x27;d need an android app too tho

He writes that there is no login system and &quot;It already knows exactly who’s using it.&quot;<p>Is there a way to get back a user ID from TestFlight?

Is this iPhone? How did you distribute said app?

I made a couple apps that only I use and is very niche because probably only I would use it but very helpful.

My biggest sadness is wishing that it was easier and more accessible to build stuff like this on iOS. Making things and distributing to the App Store is an absolute nightmare. Of course that’s also what makes it so much better than almost every other App Store. But they still let trash in.<p>I’m not sure what the right balance is, and maybe this is the right balance.

Awesome stuff. This is the type of thing that got me started with programming.

Does anyone have a tip for &quot;some kind of modern, flexible HyperCard&quot;?

For a small group messaging each other, at what point is simple SMS superior?

I love this idea! Yes an app can be small and used by a few people! :)

I maintain a whole set of services for my family I either implemented myself completely or glued from other sources.<p>We have our own no nonsense chat desktop, web and mobile apps for ios and android. Our own calendar for family events as well as to coordinate daily operations. Our own forum. Our own pages with resources and even our own documentation bot that you can ask pretty ambiguous questions and it can point you to the past posts&#x2F;documents&#x2F;chat threads that are relevant (when you don&#x27;t remember where it was mentioned but you can describe what you are looking for).<p>Even a wall mounted ipad with couple tools that we find useful. Shopping list where you can add stuff for the next shopping run. Voting for meals. Calendar which is especially useful to kids because they can book our time when they need something or they can see when I plan to do my training sessions or when I am or I am not available (I work remotely and don&#x27;t have set day plan).<p>Recently started spending time with my eldest son to add more features -- any way to get kids hooked up to programming is a win IMO.

I love this. Insight, warmth, humanity....

What a fantastic blog post!

(2020)

&gt; I know I ought to pay it forward and publish the code for my app. Even if it doesn’t work for anyone else as-is, it might provide a helpful guide — one I would have been grateful to have. But the code is marbled with application-specific values, well-salted with authentication keys.<p>Meh. Pretty disappointing excuse. Wouldn&#x27;t take long at all to separate secrets and would make the app inherently more secure anyway.

Wowzers I loved that.

(2020)