101–110 of 296 posts
I always wondered if there would be a market for smaller scale apps. I'm thinking something sold through an app "farmer's market". This could be a Patreon/Etsy style platform where maybe app devs would do streamed live coding or Q/A sessions every Saturday morning, ideally wearing denim overalls.
This 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…
> There's a beauty to engineering something having yourself as the target user, and no one else. 100%, I'm following a similar approach to you with yet another notes app solely for my own use. Have you written more about your personal project anywhere? One thing I only realised once I started building my own tools, is that you become - from day one - an unmatched world-class expert in using that tool. This seems obvi…
I have a convenience tool I made for myself, but shared with my coworkers. I deeply regret sharing it because nobody knows how to use it effectively
I’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.
One relative tried it but would ignore messages (iOS notification system design is bad, but their home screen is disorganized too), and would constantly revert to iMessage/SMS/MMS. Two other relatives who are in a WhatsApp group with me pretty much refused with "But I can talk to you on WhatsApp just fine?", or "Who am I going to talk to on there?". Ironically does not stop them from downloading Viber, Instagram etc. Thankfully, the WhatsApp bridge + Matrix client works for 95% of the use cases.
Thus, I am happy that the author's efforts found good use and were appreciated.
I love this sentiment. I built a beer inventory app exclusively for myself + guests picking a drink to try when when they’re over at my house. I’m up to 26 “users” over the past few years, but most of them just browse on my phone when they need another drink. When I talk about the app, some people immediately jump to other inventory problems in their own lives: Can you make it work for my wine fridge? Could I keep tr…
I've seen a few of these and they always fall into (non-)maintenance hell once the dev (it's always just one, because the business can't spare a whole team for something like this) leaves, or until the next re-org (read: almost certainly less than two years from any random point in time) when the responsibilities of the team it was built for are divided among other teams, or outsourced to a body shop like CapGemini that won't use it (because they can replace the functionality with an army of managers with spreadsheets, all of which they can bill for).
In short, I think it's largely a fantasy to develop custom software for small userbases on economic grounds (at least for nontechnical users using typical "real" stacks -- spreadsheets and "programmer tools" are a different story), which is kind of the point of this piece.
> 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 think you are incorrectly extrapolating to the entire community based on your personal experience. You are assuming that most of the readers at this site are working in a similar professional context that you do. You are also assuming, but all of those people who work in a professional context, do not also “cook at home.” It’s OK if you did not relate to the article. But I certainly did!
I agree with the sentiment of the poster above if applied to the majority of professional software devs though.
> In a better world, I would have built this in a day, using some kind of modern, flexible HyperCard for iOS. How much we have lost.
The mobile world brought the masses to computing in a way that desktop never could. Unfortunately, the company with the best intuitions in the space also happened to be the most closed, paranoid, and sociopathic entity in the market.
On a much smaller scale: This was my exact sentiment some time ago after remapping a bunch of keys, along with "why didn’t I think of this sooner ". It still feels magical to this day and removes 90% of annoyances when typing. Using standard keyboard layouts is like riding a toy sized tricycle now.
This resonated with me.
This is a major source of friction to "scratching your own itch" in modern software development. Makes it extremely painful to get started. And runs against an engineering mindset, as it's not understanding principles of computing or composing components in a sensible way to build a useful new thing. It's just banging your head spamming incantations found through Google until something finally works.