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Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

maggieappleton.com

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Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#11

Post by grugagag »

panphora wrote: post #6

This is my dream to. It goes something like this: - Find any cool tool online, download it, use it locally. Your data is persisted to your own local machine and your own personal cloud. - Visit any website, download it as your own, modify it. Host it as your own and continue to add to it online. - Browser vendors implement user accounts & hosting into the browser, so anyone can make a working app locally with a littl…

Micropayments is still not a thing yet. I think that if it were it would give rise to a lot of interesting movements like this one, organically more or less. The problem with open source and giving away things free is that people just take without giving back.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#12

Post by RodgerTheGreat »

panphora wrote: post #6

This is my dream to. It goes something like this: - Find any cool tool online, download it, use it locally. Your data is persisted to your own local machine and your own personal cloud. - Visit any website, download it as your own, modify it. Host it as your own and continue to add to it online. - Browser vendors implement user accounts & hosting into the browser, so anyone can make a working app locally with a littl…

The first two points are foundational design principles for Decker[1], a programming environment which can be used as a local application or as a single-file self-contained web page which still retains all the development tools. The same is true for TiddlyWiki[2].

The web ecosystem already provides the substrate necessary to realize these visions, it's a matter of building things with a particular perspective in mind; a rejection of centralized infrastructure which is in many cases simply not needed.

1) http://beyondloom.com/decker/

2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TiddlyWiki

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#13

Post by ubertaco »

skadamat wrote: post #10
iwontberude wrote: post #4

Not a single mention of Open Source Software. The author is missing a huge piece of the puzzle.

Well, from my POV, the licensing part of this is only a small part of the puzzle. Open source software that’s insanely complex to run and is developed like industrial software still doesn’t make it amenable for home cooking / barefoot use. The bigger limiter is the missing culture of deliberately small and individualized software to specific people, families, or small communities. That’s the mindset Maggie is trying…

Exactly. Licensing is the easy part. Deploy + run are the hard parts, IMO.

You can build something amazing like Immich, a shining example of open-source software that, after a lot of setup, "just works"....until the next release wants you to make well-informed decisions to your `docker-compose.yaml` file.

My wife, who likes Immich but has no interest in learning to code, is not going to do those things if I get hit by a bus, because she won't know how. She's gonna give up and just go with paying some service for photo storage, or else losing photos like everyone else.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#14

Post by meiraleal »

iwontberude wrote: post #4

Not a single mention of Open Source Software. The author is missing a huge piece of the puzzle.

What open source? The VC backed ones that are split into community version and Enterprise? Computing sovereignty and open source are completely detached of each other nowadays, unfortunately.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#15

Post by runningamok »

There is a lot of reason to be excited about local-first and how it could enable much lower costs to build useful apps (both in terms of money and skills). AI will certainly spur that on.

But I think local-first will be of the biggest benefit to small teams of professional developers who can see local opportunities bigger corporations are missing. At least in the short term.

There are barefoot developers too, but it's not as simple as professional vs barefoot — there's a spectrum of app developers, each with their own economic rationale.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#16

Post by zer00eyz »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #9
zer00eyz wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the cynical seasoned pro 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…

But the app store experience is to push people to ever bigger and bigger apps. We don't incrementally explore & expand our competency, we don't augment human intellect, we don't form man-machine symbiosis: we get pushed to the biggest already most successful apps, that leave us supplicants to their ever changing laws & dictums. The app stores by their nature don't actually let people into computing. They are the sad…

> we have power over & can shape & share

This is where She's being way too optimistic.

What we have now is software that looks like macdonalds.

She thinks the tools we have are going to enable home cooking. Software is way harder than that.

The step between is "local" restaurants. You dont need to build software for 8 billion people, or 300 million Americans. You can build for a region, or a niche group.

> It allows more. It allows soul.

You might not be old enough to remember zine's but they were a thing. We're about to have the software equivalent.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#17

Post by jay_kyburz »

anotherhue wrote: post #2

Great talk, more for the new-developer than the cynical seasoned pro but I love the direction.

All the stuff in the first half sound great, but adding an llm dependency is a complete antithesis to local first and well crafted software.

I don't really like the term barefoot developers, but local craftsman should own and understand the tools they work with and the code they write. Their tools should be local first as well.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#18

Post by bawolff »

Personally i'd rather we bridge the gap between using excel and writing python with something that is between the two, rather than relying on LLMs.

Call me a skeptic, but i remain very unconvinced that LLMs will be the enabling tool that lets non programmers program.

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#19

Post by skadamat »

For people who want more examples of this “vibe”, here’s a tiny subset of places / people / projects to check out:

https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/

https://cristobal.space/writing/folk-computer.html

https://dynamicland.org/

https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/

https://www.geoffreylitt.com/

https://maggieappleton.com/folk-interfaces

Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

#20

Post by bawolff »

panphora wrote: post #6

This is my dream to. It goes something like this: - Find any cool tool online, download it, use it locally. Your data is persisted to your own local machine and your own personal cloud. - Visit any website, download it as your own, modify it. Host it as your own and continue to add to it online. - Browser vendors implement user accounts & hosting into the browser, so anyone can make a working app locally with a littl…

That doesn't seem all that different from netscape and how it included a wysiwyg editor.

Obviously this is much harder given how much more server side the modern internet is. But i think the more fundamental problem is that 99% of users dudn't want this in the past and still dont really want this.

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