The blog layout is truly fascinating
Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers
81–90 of 179 posts
Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers
#82Sounds great, but this won't work out to the way the author imagines it. We have a very strong bias towards anything technical, but if you've ever worked outside the SWE field, you'll see that half of the people simply aren't interested in "thinking". They don't like or enjoy their jobs. They sure as hell aren't going to sit there and think, "how do I take this problem and break it down into a dozen/hundreds of small…
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Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers
#83Sounds great, but this won't work out to the way the author imagines it. We have a very strong bias towards anything technical, but if you've ever worked outside the SWE field, you'll see that half of the people simply aren't interested in "thinking". They don't like or enjoy their jobs. They sure as hell aren't going to sit there and think, "how do I take this problem and break it down into a dozen/hundreds of small…
A tangential nitpick: Scientists, Engineers who are not of the Software persuasion, Accountants, and Lawyers, to name just a few, also make up people who work "outside the SWE field". Almost all of these people are interested in thinking; a few of them will probably not be, just as one finds a few people working in the SWE field being reluctant to think. There is a very good reason why people -- even technically mind…
I've noticed that even the SWE's are annoyed by the UI's of typical enterprise software and websites, and by gratuitous UI churn.
Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers
#84Sounds great, but this won't work out to the way the author imagines it. We have a very strong bias towards anything technical, but if you've ever worked outside the SWE field, you'll see that half of the people simply aren't interested in "thinking". They don't like or enjoy their jobs. They sure as hell aren't going to sit there and think, "how do I take this problem and break it down into a dozen/hundreds of small…
I do not think it is reluctance of thinking when pianists would complain about Steinway changing the order of piano keys every few years, because a new Steinway engineer thinks his order is better.
Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like you've discouraged yourself from learning the skill of using an LLM to help you code.
That only matters if the assumption is that any skill is worth learning simply because it's a skill. You could learn the skill of running yourself over with a car, but it's either a skill you'll never use or the last skill you'll use. Either way, you're probably just as well off not bothering to learn that one.
"running yourself over with a car" feels very different from "learning to use LLMs to your advantage".
Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers
#86Sounds great, but this won't work out to the way the author imagines it. We have a very strong bias towards anything technical, but if you've ever worked outside the SWE field, you'll see that half of the people simply aren't interested in "thinking". They don't like or enjoy their jobs. They sure as hell aren't going to sit there and think, "how do I take this problem and break it down into a dozen/hundreds of small…
This bleak-ass sorry outlook & the fixed ness on looking at the bleaker parts of it, to me, isn't actually about the sad bleak people. Its about the sorry ass conditions & technosocialcultural bankrupcy that let so many people down, that didn't give them good hooks to start digging in & try enjoying their own powers. It's also about being overwhelmed and emotionally unserwater by unrewarding crappy rentier-capitalism.
The belief system of humanity in itself needs nutrients, needs to seed and grow positively people. Open source is by far one of the strongest currents about for that.
Right now open source is a mess & bogglingly complicated. Technology in general has gotten vastly less accessible year after year, the on-ramps to understanding detoured into ever more appliance-ized experiences & neofuedal cloud empires happening in other people's computers. Far fewer are primed for the esoterics of software, know the basics, or have positive rewarding experiences tinkering and tweaking. Humanity has been shoved into superficial & coopted/dishonest experiences. Heck yes, a lot of things are against the possibility of the good.
But we unlike almost all other relationships with the material world, we can directly improve things, can keep enhancing things practically without material constraint, limited chiefly by imagination & will (ML excepted I guess). We can grow the pot, open up computing & it's softer side progressively, create better on ramps & more learnable, observable, experience able authentic experiences.
Over time I hope the barriers to being interested might be less severe. The other material conditions dragging people down & shutting them off from engagement might persist. But I think there can be a very tangible source of hope here, a demonstration that people, when they are doing their thing, creating as they might, when they are empowered, are cool. Are good. Are a role model. And that - with hope - will keep us iterating & improving, will hopefully lead to more efforts to keep redefining & expanding general purpose computing & soft systems in less deeply technical terms.
I have a really strong reaction against projecting the users of today & their sorry chained-to-the-cave-wall state to what people might be if there were some honest shakes out there. Open source is far from a perfect liberator today, 100%, but this is part of the journey, is part of why we need to be practicing & trying, so we can create & iterate towards alive interesting systems that welcome people in.
Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers
#87For 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
Where would one find more?
Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers
#88Personally 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.
Microsoft has gone and done it:
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/get-started-with-...
Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers
#89If I have learnt one thing working in software engineering, specifically on AI-enabled products empowering junior engineers, and using Copilot professionally, it’s that you need even more experience to detect the subtleties in the lack of the models understanding of your domain, your specific intent. If you don’t know exactly what you’re after, and use the LLM as a sparring partner to bounce your ideas off, you’re in…
This is not really a new problem, the previous version being "idk, I copy pasted it from stack overflow." True expertise realized that the answer often lay buried in sub-comments and the top voted answer is not often the correct one. LLM's naturally do not realize any of this.
Almost every “Copy-Paste from SO” answer was accompanied with lots of caveats from other human commentators. This feedback loop is sorely missing with LLM coding assistants.
Re: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
what software would you nominate as central examples of fun? do you think there are people who want their fun to be easy fun instead of hard fun?
Just throwing it out there, but from what I've seen of it Airtable compares favourably with Excel for the "ad hoc database" use case.
I use Airtable at work actually, its quite a nice tool for hacking internal tools together. Its extension requires Javascript though, which while great for professional coders like me, IMO I don't think it would extend to a more general population as being interesting.