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

#1

Post by jsomers » Sun, Sep 11, 2022, 3:35 PM UTC

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

#2

Post by dang » Mon, Sep 12, 2022, 7:16 AM UTC

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

#3

Post by lycos » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 1:19 PM UTC

Hah, I once worked at a startup that tried to pivot to basically this almost immediately after this article was originally posted and the CEO read it, needless to say it didn't work out.

But it is fun to sometimes program something small like this for yourself (and friends/family), without having to think about the many things you would think about in a business environment. If you can let go of those mental constraints, that is. I recently made a little mobile remote control app for my e-ink picture frame and the code is terrible. Everyone who sees it is impressed and it works without any issues 90% of the time, took me about a day and I get happy every time I use it.

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

#4

Post by blairfrandeen » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 1:45 PM UTC

Wow, this article hits home. Recently my wife and I were admiring the full moon, and she wondered aloud how many moons we'd been together and said, "maybe you should use your programming stuff to find out."

A month later I surprised her with a home cooked Android app called RacoonMoon. It features a random picture of us, and along with some very cheesy love messages and inside jokes, says how many moons we've been together. It barely works, and she loves it. We are the only two users.

I wrote the app in Python and ported it to Android using Kivy, which was not an easy or straightforward process. It seemed to be the best way given that I didn't want to take the time to learn Java or Kotlin, but if I were to do it over maybe I'd bite the bullet.

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

#5

Post by joshstrange » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 2:09 PM UTC

I wonder how he handles TestFlight's 90-day limit before a build expires. I'd probably just setup a GitHub Action to run every 1-2 months (to give some buffer if something goes wrong) to push a "new" build.

Sidenote, Lambda/DynamoDB/S3 (and maybe cloudfront) is a really nice little stack to work with for one-off projects like this. I've used it a couple times now for small seasonal/burst-y projects and it's always been a joy to use. It doesn't always scale (as in larger codebase) great unless you put in the work but for a handful of "endpoints" with storage (S3) and data (DynamoDB) bucket it's very nice and dirt cheap.

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

#6

Post by smcin » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 2:14 PM UTC

blairfrandeen wrote: post #4

Wow, this article hits home. Recently my wife and I were admiring the full moon, and she wondered aloud how many moons we'd been together and said, "maybe you should use your programming stuff to find out." A month later I surprised her with a home cooked Android app called RacoonMoon. It features a random picture of us, and along with some very cheesy love messages and inside jokes, says how many moons we've been to…

Awesome. Can you give a lightning talk on that? Me and lots of others would be interested.

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

#7

Post by pxeger1 » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 2:27 PM UTC

lycos wrote: post #3

Hah, I once worked at a startup that tried to pivot to basically this almost immediately after this article was originally posted and the CEO read it, needless to say it didn't work out. But it is fun to sometimes program something small like this for yourself (and friends/family), without having to think about the many things you would think about in a business environment. If you can let go of those mental constrai…

(The article is not really about that app, but anyway...)

This is also pretty close to what BeReal is, which has seen huge success as a startup. I wonder what the difference was that made it work.

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

#8

Post by rchaud » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 2:31 PM UTC

Would be interested to know how long such an app could exist on the App Store. Apple is not fond of apps that are rarely updated.

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

#9

Post by pxeger1 » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 2:32 PM UTC

I've tried various note taking apps and never found one that worked how I liked. I now use a Dropbox folder full of plain text files and a handful of Python scripts. I've never published them, they're full of hard-coded values that only I use, and they lack 90% of features in most note-taking systems. The simplicity works for me, and that's great.

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

#10

Post by horsawlarway » Tue, Sep 13, 2022, 2:35 PM UTC

Really resonates with my recent experiences.

I want off the software equivalent of the fast food menu - crap designed to bring in the most revenue for the least expense, user health and preferences be damned.

I've already started replacing a lot of the "as a service" software I used with self-hosted equivalents.

The next one I really want to hit is "family chat" since Apple is still making a mess of it for folks with families split between iOS and Android. I'd been looking at the self-hosted options, and none of them really hit the spot - I might just bite the bullet and make my own.