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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)

#61

Post by caipira »

supertron wrote: post #36
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…

> 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…

> Have you written more about your personal project anywhere?

No, I've had plans to create a blog to write about it or make a YouTube video, but haven't come to it yet.

> 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 is something that I've also realized - a lot of times when we interact with software we kinda just fly by its UI to accomplish a goal, not paying much attention to its secondary features, options, quirks, etc - But when you write your own software, you have a map of everything in your head, and you don't have to guess what exactly a button does, how it does it or where you need to go to do that.

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

#62

Post by whywhywouldyou »

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.

Some easy answers:

1. Not all articles will be relatable to everyone, and that's perfectly fine.

2. Your "what if" scenario is trivially surmountable: write some code at home, for yourself, for something you enjoy, or for someone you care about.

I don't understand how someone could read this and not only have the takeaway that you did, but come here to mention it.

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

#63

Post by aledalgrande »

Not very home cooked, but once I was working on a project/startup of mine that involved tracking degrees of freedom/trajectories and it was very manual/empirical testing, so I made a second app that would plot everything for me in real time, receiving data via socket. This was before iOS had any AR frameworks and just as Metal was released. Nothing existed to test AR, so I made it myself, with my data format, exactly like I wanted it and it was such a quality of life feature.

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

#64

Post by caipira »

hiq wrote: post #48
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…

> Would you be willing to describe how it works / record a video of how you use it?

I'll definitely do it in the near future and post it here on HN.

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

In the sense that, if one day money becomes short, I could extract a few SAAS out of it and make some money or even sell it.

> 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?

Yes, the main app has standalone apps, where each app integrates with each other whenever possible, like listing contacts in the email app, and one of the apps is "Flow", where you can create IFTTTs between apps.

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

#65

Post by distcs »

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…

Tell us more about your project! Did you start it from scratch? Or did you use another opensource app as starting point and developed it further for yourself? What language is your app written in? Where do you run it? In CLI? or desktop GUI? The more you can share about it the merrier. I am sure others want to learn more about this too.

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

#66

Post by argiopetech »

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.

And yet, the vast majority of cooking is still done at home on relatively cheap equipment. Go build things that interest you using the tech stack you have and ignore the hype.

Try to satisfy yourself, and maybe that will lead you to a commercial kitchen with a Michelin star. I know nothing else will.

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

#68

Post by selestify »

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.

> 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

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

#69

Post by aledalgrande »

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…

Pretty sure you could slap that change in in like a couple of hours. There is no high availability or traffic requirement. Then run it from your NAS.

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

#70

Post by ttrrooppeerr »

tomcam wrote: post #46
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?

You change the file. Simple!
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