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

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

#41

Post by Glench »

siva7 wrote: post #7

> 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 like that you shared this post. I imagine for someone who has only done corporate programming that making a home-cooked meal (in programming terms) would be very refreshing and liberating!

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

#42

Post by akling »

Great read! This reminds me of a macOS app I made for my wife a few years back. It keeps track of the opening hours of all her favorite shops, and she can click a menu bar icon to see how long until each one closes today. It also warns if it's currently peak/rush hour for the shop, since she prefers to go when it's less crowded.

It's a simple Qt app that uses a text file for data storage. I wrote it after noticing that she had trouble remembering which shops are open when. I asked her what to call it, and she said "Gladiolus, like the flower" so I named it Gladiolus.

I can say for sure I've never had a more appreciative client as a programmer than the one user of Gladiolus :^)

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

#43

Post by jddj »

parasti wrote: post #10

This is an amazingly refreshing view of programming. I am envious of anyone who can apply first hand their programming skills to the world around them. I can program, but real life and programming just seem to occupy entirely different realms of my brain, unable to cross over.

Fascinating. Sometimes I think I might lean too far in the other direction.

I can't help but imagine-architect software solutions to my meatspace problems and nonproblems if I let my mind wander. I have to remember to ask myself, sure I want to build it but would I really want to use it?

By the time someone has finished telling me the awkward thing they had to do today I've got an idle loop in my brain spinning (silently) on finding a "better" way.

Admittedly, not many of these get built because time is limited, all software takes ongoing care and many cures are worse than their associated disease.

Some do, though. Particularly internal tooling for work which can be measured in $ and some projects which scratch a community itch which can be measured in positive interactions.

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

#44

Post by robofanatic »

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…

Its like your own self built cottage in the woods.

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

#45

Post by apwell23 »

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.

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

#46

Post by tomcam »

akling wrote: post #42

Great read! This reminds me of a macOS app I made for my wife a few years back. It keeps track of the opening hours of all her favorite shops, and she can click a menu bar icon to see how long until each one closes today. It also warns if it's currently peak/rush hour for the shop, since she prefers to go when it's less crowded. It's a simple Qt app that uses a text file for data storage. I wrote it after noticing th…

What if a store’s hours change?

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

#47

Post by keithalewis »

ssgodderidge wrote: post #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.

Lovely article but this made me sad/mad. How did we get to the point where this is acceptable? MAGA (Microsoft Apple Google Amazon) have a stultifying effect in our software sharing lives now.

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

#48

Post by hiq »

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 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

Would you be willing to describe how it works / record a video of how you use it? But maybe that goes against your last sentence:

> My exclusive, differential, unique characteristic against the world, my joker card.

?

I guess the idea is that you integrated all the apps with each other, such that you can create an event from a text message, forward an email to a Signal contact, this kind of things?

I quickly write scripts to automate things I do several times, but I didn't go as far as integrating all my scripts into a single one. Having things decoupled reduces the maintenance burden, such that I'm not sure I'd want to go that way either.

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

#49

Post by lambdaba »

kmarc wrote: post #33
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…

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.

please share this, I'd like to check it out

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

#50

Post by hiq »

kmarc wrote: post #33
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…

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.

How did you configure neomutt? I mostly have the default configuration, with some other tweaks I've forgotten about (like changing mailboxes using a function key). What am I missing out?
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