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

51–60 of 296 posts

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

#51

Post by noduerme »

Really cool. I love that this is a modern rejection of threaded posts, or things that gluttonously try to steal your attention. The choices (irreversibility, privacy, lack of mediation) are the same as what you get if you actually sit in a room with someone and talk.

I was quite sure I'd set it up for myself and family before I read it required AWS .. I wish instead of buckets and lambda functions... well... perhaps it's worth replicating the whole thing in Nodejs and sqlite which would be the highest praise of all ;P

[edit yeah yeah there'd have to be a bucket-like storage blob somewhere.// or would there?]

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

#52

Post by HKH2 »

factorialboy wrote: post #32
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…

Would you be open to sharing screenshots? I'm curious about the mental-sanity claim, do you not have your email + calendar setup on your phone?

Not OP, but how often do you have an app that is exactly how you want it? You might just shrug off the small annoyances, but you could fix them and make the app something that becomes second nature. The UI won't suddenly change, so you won't have to relearn how to use the app, just like you don't have to relearn physical interfaces.

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

#53

Post by jwr »

Really happy to see that!

One thing I'm always worried about when I develop one-offs myself is what happens if I'm not there to service/update/maintain the thing. For some apps (like family photo archives) this matters a lot.

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

#54

Post by distcs »

rcxdude wrote: post #23
distcs wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

The poster is speaking through the analogy: they mean most people here have coded professionally but not at home. I'm not sure I agree with that, I think a lot of programmers have done hobby projects, even if only when they were starting out.

Thanks for clearing up my confusion! That comment makes total sense now and not as baffling as it first looked.

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

#56

Post by [deleted] »

factorialboy wrote: post #32
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…

Would you be open to sharing screenshots? I'm curious about the mental-sanity claim, do you not have your email + calendar setup on your phone?

[deleted]

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

#57

Post by helboi4 »

Glench wrote: post #34

This feels very related to the larger research project of “malleable software” that lets everyday people modify and author the software they use for their own needs: https://malleable.systems/ My friend Geoffrey Litt is heading the malleable software group at Ink and Switch: https://www.geoffreylitt.com/

Never heard of this concept but got would it be great if things were more maleable. There are a lot of services that I would be way happier to use if it was possible to remove or change features.

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

#58

Post by sgt »

xprn wrote: post #31
j7ake wrote: post #22

For a small group messaging each other, at what point is simple SMS superior?

Once SMS itself becomes a more modern way of communicating. Currently every 160 (IIRC) characters costs, sending images (and god forbid videos) is barely worth it, not to mention the lack of security. Comparing to food, I would say this is as good as saying “Why not just buy a bag of chips instead of cooking a meal”

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.

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

#59

Post by Glench »

noduerme wrote: post #51

Really cool. I love that this is a modern rejection of threaded posts, or things that gluttonously try to steal your attention. The choices (irreversibility, privacy, lack of mediation) are the same as what you get if you actually sit in a room with someone and talk. I was quite sure I'd set it up for myself and family before I read it required AWS .. I wish instead of buckets and lambda functions... well... perhaps…

If I were doing something like this now I would probably try to use https://val.town It lets you just write and deploy typescript lambdas by typing into a text box :) The easiest way I know of to deploy an endpoint. It also has SQLite or blob storage access.

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

#60

Post by joshspankit »

keithalewis wrote: post #47
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.

Agreed. Devs are somewhat of an isolated segment of society and so there are few politicians thinking about the stultifying effects of App Store distribution or the fact that even the devices themselves are hostile to shared personal projects.
Post reply on HN