Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers
maggieappleton.com

The only note I have is that I don't think it's really accurate to say this approach wasn't possible in 2004. I was a working web dev in 2004, and from that perspective, what we did was pretty close to what the talk describes.

Intermediated by commerce, certainly; as I recall having put it one day in that same job after hanging up a call wherein had occasioned a request that $400 a month of backhaul be provided free of charge, it's nice there's folks out there trying to save the world, but some of us have to earn a living. ("You said you were a web dev. Why were you talking to anyone about backhaul?" I pulled cable too sometimes, in those days. The mid-00s were a different time.)

And of course there were no LLMs involved, that technology then still being much the stuff of science fiction and allied fields like futurism. Even so, though: none of us had any real idea what we were doing, but we knew how to figure out what worked and what didn't, and that was usually enough even if the level of trial and error, and the lack of rigor, were shocking by today's standards. (I wrote my first SPA, a triathlon registration system for an org that lots of folks in the DMV might recall if I mentioned a name, in 2011. Imagine my surprise when two years later, on leaving my local backwater of web dev for the mainstream, I discovered that was what I had done, when I thought I'd just been trying a wild idea I was sure would fail, because it was that or lose the contract that was keeping the business afloat...)

Honestly, the vision described in this talk is a lot more like the kind of life I thought I'd live, when I got into this line around the turn of the millennium. It'd be easy to take an overly rosy view, and maybe I am. But then too, it'd be good if not every quarter-square-mile neighborhoodlet in my city had an intimate dependency on Amazon in order to function, too.

Im that guy.

She is way off the mark on some trivial points in there and they are easy to overlook.

Right now the big players are pouring money into hardware. There is a lot of talent out on the street. If they aren't resting and vesting in those orgs what are they going to do?

It's possible for a small team to bootstrap with ZERO money.

How much do you need to earn enough to support 3 devs? Apple only takes 15% if you make less than a million a year. Is that a staff of 3? They only take 15 percent of subscriptions!!! That dosen't include android.

If you dont piss away money on on cloud (vps), on everything as a service (login, metrics) the economics are amazing.

There's room in the market for 1000 founders who do very well, you wont be google but you can live a more than comfortable life.

The app stores by their nature don't actually let people into computing. They are the sad old pre-connected paradigm, entrenching top down systems control.

What Maggie is tapping into is more than the 15/30% cut. It's about possibility & connection, about software we have power over & can shape & share. The software we have today is all dead software, delivered to us on a platter, and that dead modality is not befitting the greatness humanity can & should be tapping into.

Local First is inherently not bound, not fixed into interaction with the golems created by far off others. It allows more. It allows soul. That earnest engage-ability is something that's been missing from the consumerized world, has created enormous disbelief & disdain in a place where hope & possibility once sprung freely.

http://malleable.systems now!

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Regarding whether users will or not? Local First has a set of first principles to keep us from being too bound by software. The particular tools we have at any given point are arbitrary, secondary.

Who knows what would happen if we did have the capabilities, because right now we don't have the capabilities. Yes, Local First is about bootstrapping something new. No it doesn't create the barefoot developers automatically, doesn't make that imminent. But it makes it possible. And some will convert in, some will start being barefoot developers as it becomes possible. If & only if we make it possible. The cynicism about those who won't or the state of our tools is not yet due.