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.
An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
11–20 of 296 posts
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#12> 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. What if you have never cooked at home but all the time in a commercial kitchen? That's the reality for most of us here so it is a bit difficult to relate to this article.
> What if you have never cooked at home but all the time in a commercial kitchen? That's the reality for most of us here so it is a bit difficult to relate to this article.
Really? I'd hazard a guess that the majority here (> 50%) have never worked at a commercial kitchen!
I'm honestly curious to understand why you think most people here must have worked at commercial kitchen and never cooked at home?
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#13I’ve been wanting to make something along this spirit. A personal social network. No influencers. No ads. It rides on existing messaging rails (email, SMS, IM…) for distribution. You just post stuff to your feed, and your contacts get a notification when appropriate.
That’s a WhatsApp group.
Which is exactly what various factions of my family use for shared messaging.
It’s the purest social network….. people and messages.
Ironically owned by Facebook.
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#14Nice article and lovely concept. I'm not a professional dev, but use programming to enrich my quality of life, and it's nice to see some of those thoughts put into words.
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#15> 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. What if you have never cooked at home but all the time in a commercial kitchen? That's the reality for most of us here so it is a bit difficult to relate to this article.
It's never too late. You can start coding after work even right now. You can serve a well-cooked app to your friends and family instead of shipping a feature you don't care about to an amorphous mass of users (that you don't care about) - it's an experience worth knowing.
Fun fact: that experience will likely change you, and your commercial kitchen co-chefs will also appreciate you more afterward.
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#16> I burned some incense and threw some stones and the gods of Xcode allowed me to pass.
Gave an audible chuckle at this one. I've done many a battle with those gods; they be beasts.
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#17> 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. What if you have never cooked at home but all the time in a commercial kitchen? That's the reality for most of us here so it is a bit difficult to relate to this article.
I would recommend trying home cooking if only for the reason that, in a commercial kitchen, you have a role, but cooking at home means you will have/get to do everything yourself: from ingredient sourcing to dishwashing (and even front-of-house stuff like table service).
Carver Mead, in a hardware context, described the "tall, thin person" as someone comfortable at all layers: with their feet on the (rubylith!) layout and their heads in the architecture.
(I have read that in the days before email, it was customary to let the owners' kids sneakernet those manila "interdepartmental mail" envelopes as a summer job, because it brought them into contact with all the facets of an enterprise)
> Making the landlord and the tenant the same person has certain advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent, while the landlord does a little work. — GKC
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#18I love this. Insight, warmth, humanity....
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#19This 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 "Wow, this is amazing, how do I download it!?", and the answer is always the same: you don't.
There's a beauty to engineering something having yourself as the target user, and no one else. I'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/salary could ever offer me. My exclusive, differential, unique characteristic against the world, my joker card.
Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)
#20Is this iPhone? How did you distribute said app?
TestFlight is mention in the article so I guess yes, iPhone.
I'm actually surprised that TestFlight was available for this, since I recently worked on a private app and did a bit of research into how to distribute it - everything I read implied that TestFlight apps will be reviewed by Apple employees and must be apps that intend to eventually be distributed more widely (e.g. beta versions). I got the impression that an app for family or friends that wasn't set up with a plan for release at some point would be rejected.