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

robinsloan.com

171–180 of 296 posts

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

#171
A friend and I recently created an app to track realtime scores for a high school reunion fantasy draft (we drafted teams with a few friends and you get points if the person shows up).

With AI helping it really lowers the barrier to personal or one-off apps you wouldn't otherwise have time for. We did the app in the framework he was comfortable with, which I hadn't used, and I wrote all my code with AI.

I got smoked in the game though.

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

#172
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly, albeit with much less effort, I configured (neomutt) into the most beautiful and best, rapid UX mail client ever. I use it at work and for private purposes. People are impressed when looking at it. A handful of them asked for the config. Don't think any one ever got used to it.

What about SSO? Sadly, none of the terminal-based email clients I tried supported this, but since you said you use this at work, maybe it supports SSO login to your work email?

It's a bit of a trek to get there, but here's how to work around SSO...

1. Go to the Microsoft/Google developer console with your work account and create an "internal app" for personal use 2. Generate a set of oauth2 creds under the app 3. Use a program like mbsync or offlineimap to sync your mail down to a maildir. Iirc mbsync was more reliable but required a shim script to convert oauth2 creds to an api token. 4. Point your email client to the mail-dir.

I had this set up when I used gmail at work, but AIUI outlook should work roughly the same.

There's a ton of blog posts out there of people setting this up, unfortunately too many variations to have "one true" guide, so sorta have to pull from several places.

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

#173
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…

Not an app, but this is how I customize my OS and workflow in general, and think Linux for making it possible and even easy at times.

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

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you elaborate on what you would need to do different in terms of dev? The only thing I would do differently in this scenario would be to ensure no secrets or anything gets into the code which is a minor lift but also probably for the best.

In python I do horrible things like the following when nobody else is going to see it:

  [[[foo(x) for x in y] for y in bar_vec if baz(y)] for bar_vec in bar_mat if bar_vec != []]

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

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about SSO? Sadly, none of the terminal-based email clients I tried supported this, but since you said you use this at work, maybe it supports SSO login to your work email?

How would SSO work for a terminal? What would it do?

In this case it's easier to bypass SSO with a set of oauth2 creds, but the aws and azure clis support SSO login by opening a browser to authenticate and generate a short-lived api token that gets passed back to the cli. So it's definitely possible for terminal apps to support SSO.

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

#176
I love seeing whenever this is (re)posted.

This article had such a huge impact on my life and led to me creating many pieces of software[1][2][3] that were hyper-specific to myself and my needs at the time, which also later found an audience in others who think and work in ways similar to me.

[1]: https://notado.app - a "content-first" internet bookmarking and highlighting service which has been my second brain since 2020 after growing frustrated with Instapaper, Pinboard and Readwise. Eventually I expanded this to allow for RSS feed publishing on specific topics in an attempt to solve the "firehose" problem when following other peoples' bookmarks/shares, and at the end of last year I added what is now my most used feature of image generation from highlights for sharing on image-first/text-hostile social media platforms.

[2]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi - tiling window manager for Windows. There wasn't really anything fit for purpose on Windows when I started, and I was too spoiled by bspwm and yabai on Linux and macOS that I just had to write something before I could become a truly productive Windows user. I'm astonished that this now has 50k+ downloads.

[3]: https://kulli.sh - I use this to aggregate comments from HN/Reddit/Lemmy/Lobsters on an article I'm interested in in one place to read. This has helped me find some interesting niche communities on Reddit and Lemmy who share and discuss things I'm interested in that I otherwise wouldn't have found.

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

#177
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…

Why would you want to combine it all into one app? Having seperate apps for those things (maybe besides having calendar and email together) sounds proper to me. Seems odd to put it all together into one.

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

#178
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It feels like cooking now requires commercial quality equipment only available to the Michelin star restaurants. Why does AI make you feel this way? It feels the opposite to me — like meals that formerly required a master chef to make, but soon anyone can make for themselves at an acceptable level of quality with meal prep kits

A few months ago there was a post on HN about catching up to the current state of LLM dev and learning how to use it. In it there were recommendations for hardware - the lowest tier being a 3090/4090. When looking at the decision tree for even cheaper options, it basically said to find another hobby. Not sure if that's changed but ever since seeing that line, I've been put off of that world. I still occasionally clic…

If we're still entertaining the above analogy, a home kitchen costs more than a PC with a 3090/4090.

But when I got into software in the 90s, it was about $4000 for just a run of the mill desktop PC, which is about $8000 in today's money. And it didn't even have 3d acceleration.

In the grand scheme of things, a 3090/4090 is not expensive.

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

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can ossify it (ha!) after you have done all the work and it is mostly complete.

    git remote add origin …
    git push

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

#180
post #87

When I first read this post, it helped me decide not to try to adjust my home automation app for the masses. I have a single JavaScript file that runs all the automations in my house. Everything runs on Mqtt and this file handles all timers and temperature adjustments and turning everything off in the house when the right button is pushed and checking that the doors are locked and keeping the front porch lit when the…

That's fantastic. Sounds so much simpler than using Node-RED or something. How do you monitor the laundry? Like is your washer/dryer "smart"? or do you have some sort of vibration/current/noise sensor to determine when they finish?
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