Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

robinsloan.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 296 posts

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#151

Post by mooshx »

Love this topic, thanks OP! Many years ago I created an iOS bread dough calculator that basically hard-coded the ingredients in percentage form. I used it personally for years to make pizza crusts, etc. all in a scalable format. Once, my wife and I hosted a big "make your own" pizza party and I used the app to create enough dough for 30 or so personal pizzas.

Eventually I pushed it forward (thanks to the Unity Engine at the time) and made it a "real" app on the App Store. As others have noted, there's a large gap between bespoke, home-cooked software and commercial choices. As a full-time developer this was a side-project and still suffers, imho, as an under-invested commercial app. The app has had very modest success (pays about the equivalent of one espresso a week) but I still love it.

When an app is "just yours" there's an aura of fun about the project that can get stripped away when the trajectory becomes more commercial.

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#152

Post by kodablah »

caipira wrote: post #19

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…

Unfortunately you almost have to do this in secrecy with a homemade scraping app lest its popularity causes the site owner to take action

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#153

Post by yowlingcat »

caipira wrote: post #19

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…

I love it. I have a couple similar projects I've worked on in the past (a couple of which were what got me into engineering in the first place) and the clarity of vision you can achieve when you're really truly building something just for yourself is unparalleled. What follows is also a very unique sense of fulfillment; as you've eliminated all the societal contributors to the sense of fulfillment (which are of course fickle), what you're left with is something that by definition had to be made to make you and only you happy, and it lasts over time in a way that is durable and pure.

My greatest regret these days is how often it feels like I lack the time to do such projects -- but that of course is a cop out on my end! The hard part is only getting started and being consistent; you don't need to do that much on a week to week basis to get to somewhere really meaningful after a few years.

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#154

Post by chse »

mcculley wrote: post #91

He writes that there is no login system and "It already knows exactly who’s using it." Is there a way to get back a user ID from TestFlight?

From what I gathered, he means the app doesn't have any user authentication period because only 3-4 people can even download the app to begin with since it's restricted with TestFlight.

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#155

Post by jerojero »

Some time ago I took a sudoku app and added some features that I wanted. It was a great learning experience, my code introduced some bugs and it's not perfect but the whole thing felt really good.

Wish android development was a bit more straightforward, I always find it kind of difficult just because of the amount of things that might go wrong. Kinda like coding videogames I guess.

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#156

Post by yowlingcat »

apwell23 wrote: post #45

This is why I feel really uneasy about LLM/AI stuff. It feels like cooking now requires commercial quality equipment only available to the Michelin star restaurants. It used to be possible like showHN posts go on to become smashing success. But Dropbox like posts seem like an impossibility now. I've been having serious mental crisis from this realization.

Don't fall for the apocalyptic doomsday narrative. It is in the interests /of/ the 900 lb gorillas in the space to make it seem like it requires so much investment that you may as well not bother.

But there's a thriving community on HuggingFace and Reddit showing what you can do with the lo-fi versions. In particular, the evolution of lower bit inference (and I believe training as well even) has reduced memory requirements and because of that hardware requirements considerably. There is a lot you can do with your own local gen AI model running on your personal machine.

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#157

Post by lobsterthief »

bberenberg wrote: post #144
caipira wrote: post #19

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…

I wish more people would take stuff like this, oss it, and disable PR requests and issues. Let others use it / learn / build on it with the clear expectation that feedback and contributions are unwanted.

To be fair, when you do that you would approach coding the application differently, which adds to development time. Also, it can change the whole mentality of developing it. Probably why more people don’t do that, though I agree it would be nice.

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#158

Post by sgt »

worksonmine wrote: post #146
sgt wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people don't actually use SMS though, despite thinking that they use SMS. My mom still thinks she uses SMS, despite it just being iMessage in the end. Messages can be long, video, images etc are easy and we have about 4-5 different group conversations going at any given time in my family.

"Most people" do not own an iPhone or use iMessages, maybe in your bubble, but not in the real world.

My family does... also, like 9 out of 10 teenagers in some places like the US, do.

Re: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

#160

Post by ranting-moth »

jimbokun wrote: post #110

> In our actual world, I built it in about a week, and roughly half of that time was spent wrestling with different flavors of code-signing and identity provisioning and I don’t even know what. I burned some incense and threw some stones and the gods of Xcode allowed me to pass. This resonated with me. This is a major source of friction to "scratching your own itch" in modern software development. Makes it extremely…

It's spectacular how awful Apple's signing/certs/profiles dev UX is.
Post reply on HN