Personal Software Is Becoming a Trend
1–10 of 30 posts
Re: Personal Software Is Becoming a Trend
#2If we had simply followed the Unix philosophy to its full potential, we would have a lot more “personal” software that people could create for whatever niche purpose they need.
Re: Personal Software Is Becoming a Trend
#3Working in software professionally, the internal struggle I seem to have is separating "personal software" from "resume fodder." The line of thinking is generally: "Why create this one-off thing for myself when I can publicize it, get some contributors, and add it to my list of successful OSS projects." It's a terrible loop, to be honest.
Re: Personal Software Is Becoming a Trend
#4I can relate to this. I've never been able to code anything more advanced than, say, a simple html website, but over the last year I've used LLM's to develop a range of little software tools (and games) that are specific to my needs. Some of these fill a niche that either doesn't exist and some are just me slapping a GUI onto command line tools.
Re: Personal Software Is Becoming a Trend
#5in the eighties this was just called learning how to use BASIC
:v
Re: Personal Software Is Becoming a Trend
#6Working in software professionally, the internal struggle I seem to have is separating "personal software" from "resume fodder." The line of thinking is generally: "Why create this one-off thing for myself when I can publicize it, get some contributors, and add it to my list of successful OSS projects." It's a terrible loop, to be honest.
a possible hack for that: write personal software to help you write the OSS project
Re: Personal Software Is Becoming a Trend
#7I can see a future where a lot of SaaS gets pushed down to APIs or low level “pipes” and we’re all just speaking / typing requests into a machine that creates what we need just in time. Software kind of unfurling in front of our feet as we walk in our desired direction.
Re: Personal Software Is Becoming a Trend
#8I wrote a notes app in react native just for myself a few years ago (out of frustration after changing notes apps every year or so) that does /exactly/ what I want and it has been the most used app on my phone for a few years now.
It's offline-first but syncs reliably, uses the exact interpretation and display of markdown I like, searches and sorts the way I like, integrates with AI only in the ways I want it to (specific search capabilities, summarizing), uses on-device dictation via whisper so speech-to-text works when I'm away from a data connection, tracks location... I could go on and on since I add a new feature every month or so from a note (inside the app!) where I keep track of little things I wish it had.
But most importantly nothing ever gets added to it that I don't want... ever. No one else ever updates the terms of service, the UI layout, the retention period, the formatting, the shortcuts... there isn't some subscription I have to keep track of, or "pro" modes, or popups telling me about new features I should check out.
And since I have access to the backing db I can do all kinds of fun stuff with the data-- I've been playing way more with local LLMs lately with it.
I think it's healthy to remember that not everything has to be a startup or a public github repo.
Re: Personal Software Is Becoming a Trend
#9Working in software professionally, the internal struggle I seem to have is separating "personal software" from "resume fodder." The line of thinking is generally: "Why create this one-off thing for myself when I can publicize it, get some contributors, and add it to my list of successful OSS projects." It's a terrible loop, to be honest.
I've been struggling with some sort of variant of this.
I'm a prolific FOSS contributor, but a few years ago I switched to a very time-intensive day job and we had our first kid, and my FOSS contributions have waned a fair bit as a result. I still need to do tech stuff outside work to have an extra creative hobby outlet, so I've been doing HW/SW DIY projects like [1] and [2] that don't put me into the critical path of anyone. They're fun, and I open source them, but I'm permanently stressed and a bit guilt-ridden that compared to my previous spare-time output they're not really of much use for anyone else. My "personal software" dies alone at home, whereas previously it was used by millions.
I'm working on a DIY toy robot now[3], and I'm trying to find a middle ground there by launching a new project with a library, tools and tester GUI to control serial servo motors by various vendors that the robot is the dogfood-test for. I'm hoping this is the solution: Build "personal software", but clearly pull out the parts that are usable for everyone into a module that you put in a little extra effort to make it more available for general consumption.
E.g. with the e-ink newspaper, I should look into making the display driver code I wrote into a lib as well I guess ...
1 = https://github.com/eikehein/hyelicht
2 = https://imgur.com/a/diy-automatic-e-ink-newspaper-using-rust...
Re: Personal Software Is Becoming a Trend
#10[deleted]