An app can be a home-cooked meal -- Robin Sloan on coding for yourself \ stacker news ~mostly

An app can be a home-cooked meal -- Robin Sloan on coding for yourself www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

4800 sats \ 13 comments \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears 21 Apr mostly_harmless

This actually got posted in ~tech in January, but it was from @hn and I don't think anyone clicked through to read it. That's a shame. I thought about throwing this in there or ~devs or someplace similar, but honestly, it's about so much more than just code.

This is a piece by the author Robin Sloan, a fantastic writer of fiction, but also someone who's been coding on and off for years, but never at a professional level.

And he decided to make a chat app just for his family. Four people. No plans to expand it to ever be useful for anyone else.

The requirements there are drastically different, and I love the analogy he comes up with:

The exhortation “learn to code” has its foundations in market value. “Learn to code” is suggested as a way up, a way out. “Learn to code” offers economic leverage, professional transformation. “Learn to code” goes on your resume.

But let’s substitute a different phrase: “learn to cook”. People don’t only learn to cook so they can become chefs. Some do! But many more people learn to cook so they can eat better, or more affordably. Because they want to carry on a tradition. Sometimes they learn because they’re bored! Or even because they enjoy spending time with the person who’s teaching them.

But the whole thing's worth reading. Just a delightful little piece on the differences between creating something for your family or for the world as a whole.

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365 sats \ 1 reply \ @rheedi0 22 Apr

I love this idea.

I've made a few programs like this for just myself or my family. One was an app that would remind me when a Bulls game was going to be on regular TV (never had cable). Another would generate and send weather updates to be displayed on the digital photo frame in my kitchen (too cheap to get a tablet).

My favorite, though, was for an office prank. It was at my first job as a dev and there were just a half-dozen or so of us in a relatively small space. We listened to music a lot in the main room and one of the guys complained about a particular artist all the time. I want to say it was Taylor Swift or Katy Perry, but I can't recall exactly who.

Anyway, another dev and I started monitoring the office router to figure out the mac ID to his phone. Then we set up a script to watch the router for that mac ID and start playing this music he hated every time he entered the office.

He thought it was a coincidence for a couple weeks. Good times. :)

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 22 Apr

Brilliant.

I worked in telecom a long time ago, and was in a position to route an ISDN-worth of toll free 1-800 numbers to my friend's home line. Still one of the programming projects I feel the most satisfaction about.

121 sats \ 2 replies \ @elvismercury 22 Apr

He wrote another article, on creating his own protocol that inspired me so much. Between that one, and the one you linked, I think he taps into the beauty and the magic of making things, of just doing shit because there is something powerful in doing and making.

I can't tell if it's me or if it's the times. I guess maybe the latter, since people are sharing it. We all have the same vitamin deficiency.

108 sats \ 1 reply \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears OP 22 Apr

Wow. That article is fantastic. I really regret only having been reading his other newsletter (which is writing focused), as the lab one is just as wonderful.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @elvismercury 22 Apr

Symmetrically, I didn't even know he was a writer or had a writing newsletter, so you've expanded my reality :)

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @Signal312 22 Apr

Hey, I got one!

I have been recently trying to get OFF all the cloud based apps that I used to use. Like, for instance, Workflowy. I loved it, it was easy to organize things, but I don't want to need to be hooked up to the internet in order to work on my own notes.

Anyway, I did a lot of looking around for stuff that would suit me. Didn't need a lot of bells and whistles, I basically just wanted easy outlining. And I didn't find anything open source that I liked.

Then I figured out a way to do it, easily, in Notepad++, with the feature of folding/unfolding.

In Notepad++, under Language, User Defined Language, you can create your own user defined language. It's very simple. I set the character for defining what to fold (I used square brackets), set an extension for the file type, assigned keyboard shortcuts for folding and unfolding, and VOILA! Something that works very well for me. No yearly payment needed, and I don't need to be connected to the internet in order to be able to work on things!

I love the simplicity of Notepad++, even for editing regular documents, not code.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @south_korea_ln 22 Apr

Made my own little task manager the other day. Extremely simple but effective.

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @BenAllenG 21 Apr

I made a program to make a vanity npub for myself

131 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 21 Apr

When I was in college I built an iOS app for my girlfriend to take and catalog pictures of her bruises, which was a weird request, but it was fun to build something with such a narrow, bizarre scope.

110 sats \ 0 replies \ @WeAreAllSatoshi 21 Apr

Many years ago, I made a website that I ran on a local server in my home to play the board game Clue. Instead of using the papers provided with the game to track your hints, cards revealed, guesses etc, you could track it on this webpage. The core game logic still happened IRL on the board. I thought it would be fun and also let us stop wasting papers.