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

• unnikrishnan_r 3y ago
  Beautiful! I feel this post is more relevant now than ever with the presence of Chatgpt and its like. Almost anyone who is fluent in English, can articulate what they want and is willing to spend a bit of time configuring development environments can churn out personal projects (falling within state of the art) over a weekend. So lucky to be alive right now.
• koliber 3y ago
  Your writeup, the idea of the app, and how you executed it is a breath of fresh air. The idea of building for a TAM (total addressable market) that is in single digits is a nice contrast to pretty much everything that's out there. Such an app is one step higher than a learning project, with oodles of utility, albeit for one or a few people. But those are the most important people in your life, so its much more fulfilling! Comparing it to cooking a meal at home for your family is a perfect analogy.
  • rchaud 3y ago
    TAM-driven development is at odds with the spirit of the minicomputer era, where it was expected that people would be making applications for themselves first.
• globular-toast 3y ago
  Is this iPhone? How did you distribute said app?
  • vivty 3y ago
    In the text it says: "I distributed the app to my family using TestFlight, and in TestFlight it shall remain forever: a cozy, eternal beta."
  • aziaziazi 3y ago
    TestFlight is mention in the article so I guess yes, iPhone.
    • wrikl 3y ago
      I'm actually surprised that TestFlight was available for this, since I recently worked on a private app and did a bit of research into how to distribute it - everything I read implied that TestFlight apps will be reviewed by Apple employees and must be apps that intend to eventually be distributed more widely (e.g. beta versions). I got the impression that an app for family or friends that wasn't set up with a plan for release at some point would be rejected.
      • lawgimenez 3y ago
        Based on the blog post, it was created February 2020 where the rules you mentioned was not enforced yet. But around that time I believe you can also export an ipa file so anyone can install but you have to include your target’s UUID in the app signature.
      • ceejayoz 3y ago
        It’s a more cursory review, and missing features are fine. Would be easy to slip through.
      • m463 3y ago
        Hopefully legislation will fix this. People are able to do things in their own home without asking Amana or GE permission and having their recipes examined and reviewed.
      • willcannings 3y ago
        You can distribute to "internal" testers (people you add to your developer account) without any review process. The app is only reviewed if you want to distribute to external testers.
  • davidb_ 3y ago
    I had the same question. He says TestFlight, but he's handwaving some of the headaches of that. TF builds expire every 90 days. The other option would be an adhoc certificate, but then you have to collect everyone's apple id. Apple makes this kind of app distribution process more painful than it needs to be.
    • rockostrich 3y ago
      It should hopefully be easier in the future when side loading is possible on iOS.
      • davidb_ 3y ago
        Sideloading is still blocked in the US in their new releases. Only allowed where mandated (EU)
    • multjoy 3y ago
      With four users that’s not as onerous as it sounds.
• Foreignborn 3y ago
  This post significantly influenced me back when it was first on HN, and helped me articulate what I was already doing subconsciously. I started a homelab years ago like a lot of folks here, and slowly that’s changed to being a hobby of building and selfhosting applications for my “users” of 5-15 of my family and closest friends. I’ve written so many little apps for them (e.g movie night scheduler) and integrations into our group chat for whatever someone can think of. It’s really blossomed into something that has made us all talk and hang out so much more. Even distant friend groups that don’t know each other have now met in person (without me!) and gone to baby showers, weddings, etc. If anyone has a group of friends like that, consider making something for them!
  • thebricklayr 3y ago
    Ironically, this is a great way to build actual products (if you’re open to letting them grow). Three years ago I created a simple app for my family and friends to share recipes together. I kept adding features they requested, and after about two years, the app was apparently good enough that people started sharing it by word of mouth. By October, the app had grown big enough that I had to start charging new users to cover server costs. I’m now contemplating a future where I work on it full-time.
    • samstave 3y ago
      https://i.imgur.com/dE9mYQ2.jpg https://i.imgur.com/dE9mYQ2.jpg
      • thebricklayr 3y ago
        https://umami.recipes https://umami.recipes
        • samstave 3y ago
          LOVELY. I have a boatload of feature creep ideas for you to reject... Shall I post them here, or DM you? - This is an app logic that works for more than just cooking - but a big thing is OCR a hand written recipe from familial cookbooks... I still have my mothers, as well as hand written recipes from my grandmother, their friends, etc. Take a pic of a recipe, OCR if can - else host the pic? -- However, an interesting aspect of the "recipe" app logic is that it can apply to, say, mechanics "Here is a recipe for replacing this part/working on this thing"
• siva7 3y ago
  > 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.
  • althea_tx 3y ago
    I think you are incorrectly extrapolating to the entire community based on your personal experience. You are assuming that most of the readers at this site are working in a similar professional context that you do. You are also assuming, but all of those people who work in a professional context, do not also “cook at home.” It’s OK if you did not relate to the article. But I certainly did!
    • pcthrowaway 3y ago
      For what it's worth, I think HN audience by nature of spending their free time learning about interesting techy things is more likely to be doing their own "home cooking". I agree with the sentiment of the poster above if applied to the majority of professional software devs though.
  • distcs 3y ago
    > 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?
    • rcxdude 3y ago
      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.
• codersfocus 3y ago
  I’ve been wanting to make something along this spirit. A personal social network. No influencers. No ads. It rides on existing messaging rails (email, SMS, IM…) for distribution. You just post stuff to your feed, and your contacts get a notification when appropriate.
  • andrewstuart 3y ago
    That’s a WhatsApp group. Which is exactly what various factions of my family use for shared messaging. It’s the purest social network….. people and messages. Ironically owned by Facebook.
  • wousser 3y ago
    Like Monica, Contact Journal or the Apple Journal app? https://www.monicahq.com/ https://www.monicahq.com/ https://socialcontactjournal.com/ https://socialcontactjournal.com/ https://www.apple.com/ae/newsroom/2023/12/apple-launches-journal-app-a-new-app-for-reflecting-on-everyday-moments/ https://www.apple.com/ae/newsroom/2023/12/apple-launches-jou...
  • yaky 3y ago
    IMO the technical part of this is easier than the social part. I've been hosting a Matrix server for years, and use it to talk to my wife and one friend. One relative tried it but would ignore messages (iOS notification system design is bad, but their home screen is disorganized too), and would constantly revert to iMessage/SMS/MMS. Two other relatives who are in a WhatsApp group with me pretty much refused with "But I can talk to you on WhatsApp just fine?", or "Who am I going to talk to on there?". Ironically does not stop them from downloading Viber, Instagram etc. Thankfully, the WhatsApp bridge + Matrix client works for 95% of the use cases. Thus, I am happy that the author's efforts found good use and were appreciated.
• parasti 3y ago
  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.
  • jddj 3y ago
    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.
    • aebtebeten 3y ago
      see https://xkcd.com/974/ https://xkcd.com/974/
• block_dagger 3y ago
  Nice write up. I like building small apps like this as well, like gigtablet.com which I made for my band to use. It has us 7 users and we’re happy with it so that’s all that matters.
• SturgeonsLaw 3y ago
  Nice article and lovely concept. I'm not a professional dev, but use programming to enrich my quality of life, and it's nice to see some of those thoughts put into words.
• ssgodderidge 3y ago
  > 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.
  • keithalewis 3y ago
    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.
    • joshspankit 3y ago
      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.
    • brk 3y ago
      >How did we get to the point where this is acceptable? IMO, bad actors. 40 years ago we didn't need much in the name of cyber security, restrictions, controls, etc. You most likely personally knew the vast majority of other people that had any kind of access to your systems, or that you exchanged any kind of electronic data with. As the aperture of users and developers has opened, risks have increased. There is probably some analogy here similar to how the value of network increases exponentially with the number of connected devices, the risk factor increases exponentially with the number of users and potential software developers for an ecosystem.
      • jwells89 3y ago
        Exactly. Even major “trusted” third parties like Adobe can’t actually be trusted to keep their fingers out of parts of the system they have no business poking around in. Time and time again it’s been proven prudent to treat third party devs as hostile parties by default, with trust being hard-earned.
    • 3y ago
• chrisweekly 3y ago
  I love this. Insight, warmth, humanity....
• caipira 3y ago
  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 one else. I'm 100% convinced this project single-handedly keep my mental wellbeing in check, and it provides me with a constant source of hopefulness and happiness to the future - that no company/salary could ever offer me. My exclusive, differential, unique characteristic against the world, my joker card.
  • alentred 3y ago
    > I have been working on a personal project for the last 10 years that replaces every other app I used to use Elon, is it you? ;)
  • factorialboy 3y ago
    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?
    • HKH2 3y ago
      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.
      • ParetoOptimal 3y ago
        The above are all reasons I use emacs.
        • dingnuts 3y ago
• j7ake 3y ago
  For a small group messaging each other, at what point is simple SMS superior?
  • xprn 3y ago
    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”
    • sgt 3y ago
      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.
      • worksonmine 3y ago
        "Most people" do not own an iPhone or use iMessages, maybe in your bubble, but not in the real world.
        • sgt 3y ago
          My family does... also, like 9 out of 10 teenagers in some places like the US, do.
        • piperswe 3y ago
          The people that don't use iMessage probably use RCS, not SMS.
          • worksonmine 3y ago
            Yes, which was rolled out recently, and when these talk to each other it falls back to SMS, there's Messenger/WhatsApp/or whatever people are using today. That's not the point I'm disagreeing with though, it's just a reminder that the claim that "most people" own an iPhone is delusional. It's just as ridiculous as someone only hanging out with billionaires claiming "most people fly private jets", and it can be healthy to consider the rest of the world from time to time. I live in Europe and while iPhones aren't uncommon they don't have the status they (seem to) have in the US and most people use Android.
• flobosg 3y ago
  (2020)
• wkjagt 3y ago
  Lovely idea. I’ve been thinking of “small scale web things” a lot recently, as I’ve been growing more and more tired of the planet scale web. I live in a small village in Canada and it would be nice to have something “village scale” that is only of interest, and as such perfectly adapted to only our village. Because it’s so small scale (we’re only a couple thousand), it can run on something in my closet. If it goes down for some reason, there’s no being angry with some large corporation behind it because it’s just me, and we mostly all know (of) each other here. If it’s temporarily down because or a power outage (which happens quite regularly here, especially during snow storms), even that will feel local: there’s a good chance users will have the same power outage. I’m probably being idealist and I’ll never do anything like this. Part of me also knows that most people will just continue using Facebook groups etc anyway.
  • d1sxeyes 3y ago
    While I am very much aligned with you that the “planet scale” stuff is tiring, I think you’re falling into a trap I myself often find myself in of “I want to create something. What can I create?” It doesn’t actually make any sense for anyone except you, because fundamentally you’ve not actually got a product, you’ve only got a market. Bear in mind that it’s perfectly legitimate to scratch your own itch and just build something for the sake of building it, and that’s a home-cooked meal too.
  • eternityforest 3y ago
    I'm trying to get as many people I know onto Meshtastic as possible. $25 hardware, no central server(I quite like not having home servers to maintain!), no ham licence, phone-based control. Eventually, of course, I'd like to do Some Really Cool Project with it beyond the default functionality, but I have no idea what.
    • wkjagt 3y ago
      I never heard of Meshtastic. Looks very interesting. Going to read up on it for sure, thanks for sharing!
• Glench 3y ago
  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/ https://malleable.systems/ My friend Geoffrey Litt is heading the malleable software group at Ink and Switch: https://www.geoffreylitt.com/ https://www.geoffreylitt.com/
  • helboi4 3y ago
    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.
• murph314 3y ago
  I love this sentiment. I built a beer inventory app exclusively for myself + guests picking a drink to try when when they’re over at my house. I’m up to 26 “users” over the past few years, but most of them just browse on my phone when they need another drink. When I talk about the app, some people immediately jump to other inventory problems in their own lives: Can you make it work for my wine fridge? Could I keep track of my kids’ ever-changing wardrobe? I’d love to manage my Warhammer collection this way! It certainly seems like there could be a consumer product to help tackle those problems, but it’s not gonna be my app. Edit: In more of a work context, I think internal tooling for specific users or teams can feel similarly empowering. When you have an intentionally-constrained set of users, finding product-market fit and making sure the solution actually works for their needs becomes the only goal. And with so few users, it’s easy to keep tabs on what is and isn’t working for them.
  • brindy 3y ago
    Is your app open source? If not, have you considered that? You could just say in the readme, "fork it if you want it to do something specific". Sounds like it could be a good starting point for a bunch of things. :)
  • ElevenLathe 3y ago
    > In more of a work context, I think internal tooling for specific users or teams can feel similarly empowering. When you have an intentionally-constrained set of users, finding product-market fit and making sure the solution actually works for their needs becomes the only goal. And with so few users, it’s easy to keep tabs on what is and isn’t working for them. I've seen a few of these and they always fall into (non-)maintenance hell once the dev (it's always just one, because the business can't spare a whole team for something like this) leaves, or until the next re-org (read: almost certainly less than two years from any random point in time) when the responsibilities of the team it was built for are divided among other teams, or outsourced to a body shop like CapGemini that won't use it (because they can replace the functionality with an army of managers with spreadsheets, all of which they can bill for). In short, I think it's largely a fantasy to develop custom software for small userbases on economic grounds (at least for nontechnical users using typical "real" stacks -- spreadsheets and "programmer tools" are a different story), which is kind of the point of this piece.
• supertron 3y ago
  I enjoyed the "Colophon" page almost as much as the article https://www.robinsloan.com/colophon/ https://www.robinsloan.com/colophon/ I love the built-in style guide. I'm totally stealing some ideas from that...
  • _fool 3y ago
    If you liked that, check out also his newsletter and his fiction writing - both are stellar (his is the only newsletter I read, even though I pay for other ones!)
• akling 3y ago
  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 :^)
  • tomcam 3y ago
    What if a store’s hours change?
    • ttrrooppeerr 3y ago
      You change the file. Simple!
      • tomcam 3y ago
        I like it. I of course was running through all kinds of scraping scenarios… which is why you got the app done and I didn’t,
        • klausjensen 3y ago
          This resonates with me...
        • PawgerZ 3y ago
          Just to let you know, that wasn't the original commentor, so it could stil involve scrpaing (which is what I expected, too).
          • andiareso 3y ago
            I would guess using Google's Places API. They have busy time reports and hours that are most likely updated by the business owner. No scraping needed
• apwell23 3y ago
  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.
  • argiopetech 3y ago
    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.
  • selestify 3y ago
    > 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
    • speff 3y ago
      A few months ago there was a post on HN about catching up to the current state of LLM dev and learning how to use it. In it there were recommendations for hardware - the lowest tier being a 3090/4090. When looking at the decision tree for even cheaper options, it basically said to find another hobby. Not sure if that's changed but ever since seeing that line, I've been put off of that world. I still occasionally click on HN links advertising new methods which can be run on "consumer" cards and every time it's just a 3090/4090... I don't have that much money.
      • ParetoOptimal 3y ago
        For training or inference? The p40 was on the inference side of the tree and you can get one on eBay for $200 or less.
• noduerme 3y ago
  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?]
  • Glench 3y ago
    If I were doing something like this now I would probably try to use https://val.town 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.
  • aledalgrande 3y ago
    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.
• jwr 3y ago
  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.
• saga81 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • sjsdaiuasgdia 3y ago
    You say that, but the page is nothing but a form asking for name and work email with a "request access" button. Literally no other information is provided beyond "The end to end developer tool for TypeScript developers". I assume this is some poorly executed self-promotion on your part. Maybe start with making your site say something about what the product actually is, can do, etc.
• aledalgrande 3y ago
  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.
• camillomiller 3y ago
  Robin Sloan is a treasure. His newsletter is also top notch content.
  • rockostrich 3y ago
    As are his short stories, books, and olive oil.
• mbork_pl 3y ago
  Wow, thanks! I read it a long time ago, and later wanted to find this exact article, but couldn't. I also have quite a few tools like this, although on another platform (Emacs). I love the whole concept of "home-cooked apps". And btw, the first project like this I made - for myself and my family - was a database-like app on a Commodore 64 over three decades ago...
• wiradikusuma 3y ago
  At the same time, I feel the gap is widening between these and professional apps. It's easier to write apps, and it's harder to write "real" apps (for the masses). I'm writing a book (https://opinionatedlaunch.com https://opinionatedlaunch.com) over the course of 3+ years and I have to keep updating the "Mobile" chapters. Not because of some fancy new framework, but because both Apple and Google keep adding "requirements." Sure, they're for the better (e.g. more strict access to phone GPS, etc) but if you don't keep up, eventually you'll find your apps removed by the platform at some point in time. In this sense, there's no "done". You probably can still distribute that little program you wrote in 1990 in Pascal. I don't know the equivalent for mobile apps. (Distribute, not run. You can run it easily on your old phones).
  • manifoldgeo 3y ago
    > there's no "done" I'm totally with you re: Android and Apple being walled-garden ecosystems with ever-changing rules. But, don't you feel like this is true of most software (that it's never "done")? In my experience, there aren't many categories of software that can be truly feature-complete unless they are fully decoupled from popular culture. Maybe GNU units or grep can be called "done", but most apps have to change with the world around them.
    • JohnFen 3y ago
      > don't you feel like this is true of most software (that it's never "done")? The problem is that "done" is a subjective term. Most of the software I use on a regular basis is "done" as far as I'm concerned. If it didn't meet my needs, I wouldn't be using it on a regular basis. This ignores security issues, of course, but most of the software I use on the regular doesn't have a networking component, so that's not as much of an issue.
  • jes5199 3y ago
    I've been thinking about this a lot, and I have two solutions: * distribute on Testflight and never actually do a real release * make an HTML app that works well on mobile, and can be cached for offline Gradually I think I'm coming to prefer doing the HTML version
• philip1209 3y ago
  This is great. I have a little internal app for my company. Just an isolated Rails app. It touches no internal business systems, but whenever I need somewhere to put a little code - it goes there. It has my growth chart, a little search engine for some internal data, a couple scripts to remind me about recurring actions, and some random integration tools like an RSS->Email script for the blog. I recommend everybody just have a "miscellaneous" app separate from customer data for non-core code. Having a low barrier to building fun things liberates the mind. Not all code has to be high-stakes business work.
  • coldtrait 3y ago
    This is sweet. I'm learning RoR now and am curious how this is deployed. Is it a webapp?
• FergusArgyll 3y ago
  I may have made a very simple app for someone to get around their filter on their laptop....
• sss111 3y ago
  i recently had to split a lot of transactions among friends. I realized that all the commerical apps out there(splitwise etc) weren't gonna split the taxes evenly. So I made my own bill splitting app and have been using it ever since! Another recent app I made happened when I moved into a new apartment. I realized tha the doors were very soundproof so if someone knocked at the main door, there was a good chance I wasn't gonna hear it. So I put up a QR Code at the door, pointed it to a webapp and that basically functioned as virtual bell. Where I would get a notification on my iphone and apple watch everytime someone "knocked"!
• sandos 3y ago
  This reminds me of my app "Delayed" which I started writing when Android phones were new, and I was commuting by train in Stockholm, Sweden. I worked about a 2 minute walk from the train platform, but I still wanted to know if they were delayed, also I wanted to avoid the proprietary platforms' slowness. I wanted to be able keep working until I knew the train was about to leave. The mobile networks at the times were abysmally slow and unreliable, the API I was using was slow, basically loading times were unacceptable, I needed the info without delay. No, actually pre-fetched even so that it was working even when offline. I ended up scheduling my app using Tasker so that when I was likely commuting it started updating the timetable in the background. Now I always had instant info available, as good as I could at least. Plan was to release the app but I eventually realized I would never polish the app to a releasable state, but it still worked 100% for my exact usecase. So I never did get further than a beta test on the Play Store.
• bryancoxwell 3y ago
  Wowzers I loved that.
• citruscomputing 3y ago
  > In a better world, I would have built this in a day, using some kind of modern, flexible HyperCard for iOS. How much we have lost.
  • toyg 3y ago
    To be fair: this app would not have existed on the desktop. Our families don't like to sit at a desk for hours, fighting with imaginary concepts, like we do. The mobile world brought the masses to computing in a way that desktop never could. Unfortunately, the company with the best intuitions in the space also happened to be the most closed, paranoid, and sociopathic entity in the market.
  • nxobject 3y ago
    Once a while we get a post where everyone has an excuse to gush about Delphi/Lazarus/Free Pascal etc. in the comments, but no one's quite sure about the iOS story and no one really has the time to check up on it...
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• enobrev 3y ago
  When I first read this post, it helped me decide not to try to adjust my home automation app for the masses. I have a single JavaScript file that runs all the automations in my house. Everything runs on Mqtt and this file handles all timers and temperature adjustments and turning everything off in the house when the right button is pushed and checking that the doors are locked and keeping the front porch lit when the sun is going down and dimming as the sun comes up, and heats my office when I'm in it and it's colder than the rest of my house, but not otherwise, and notifies us when the washer or dryer are done or when it's time to change the automated cat litter. Adding a device takes about 5 minutes. Changing a timer takes less. I've ssh'd in and changed things from my phone when lazy on the couch. The commit history is practically useless. The code isn't ideal for a team. It could use a UI. But I love it. And my family is happy with how it all seems to work without much hassle.
  • rustyminnow 3y ago
    That's fantastic. Sounds so much simpler than using Node-RED or something. How do you monitor the laundry? Like is your washer/dryer "smart"? or do you have some sort of vibration/current/noise sensor to determine when they finish?
    • enobrev 3y ago
      I'm using the power monitoring feature on a "heavy duty" z-wave power switch (zooz zen-15) to track the power usage. When it jumps over a threshold for at least a couple seconds, I assume the appliance is on, and then when it drops to zero for at least a couple seconds, I assume it's "done". Same goes for the kitty litter box, although that's just a standard z-wave power switch, not a "heavy-duty" one. That one gets some false positives, so our counter gets a bit higher than the real one, but the discrepancy isn't a huge deal. Looking forward to debugging this one eventually.
• mcculley 3y ago
  He writes that there is no login system and "It already knows exactly who’s using it." Is there a way to get back a user ID from TestFlight?
  • chse 3y ago
    From what I gathered, he means the app doesn't have any user authentication period because only 3-4 people can even download the app to begin with since it's restricted with TestFlight.
• blitz_skull 3y ago
  My biggest sadness is wishing that it was easier and more accessible to build stuff like this on iOS. Making things and distributing to the App Store is an absolute nightmare. Of course that’s also what makes it so much better than almost every other App Store. But they still let trash in. I’m not sure what the right balance is, and maybe this is the right balance.
• rrr_oh_man 3y ago
  On a much smaller scale: This was my exact sentiment some time ago after remapping a bunch of keys, along with "why didn’t I think of this sooner". It still feels magical to this day and removes 90% of annoyances when typing. Using standard keyboard layouts is like riding a toy sized tricycle now.
  • nop_slide 3y ago
    What are some of your favorite remaps?
• erikerikson 3y ago
  (2020)
• BenoitEssiambre 3y ago
  I always wondered if there would be a market for smaller scale apps. I'm thinking something sold through an app "farmer's market". This could be a Patreon/Etsy style platform where maybe app devs would do streamed live coding or Q/A sessions every Saturday morning, ideally wearing denim overalls.
  • rrr_oh_man 3y ago
    How would a "smaller scale apps farmer's market" be different from random freelancing?
• palemoonale 3y ago
  I'd rather home-cook and take regular walks around the district, than having to spend even more time w/ tech after for work. Work is already kind of fulfilling, even as a manager, when you still can dabble with lower-level things and tools work. But spending your pasttime on more tech? Thats so sad, seriously.
• jhartwig 3y ago
  What a fantastic blog post!
• jimbokun 3y ago
  > In our actual world, I built it in about a week, and roughly half of that time was spent wrestling with different flavors of code-signing and identity provisioning and I don’t even know what. I burned some incense and threw some stones and the gods of Xcode allowed me to pass. This resonated with me. This is a major source of friction to "scratching your own itch" in modern software development. Makes it extremely painful to get started. And runs against an engineering mindset, as it's not understanding principles of computing or composing components in a sensible way to build a useful new thing. It's just banging your head spamming incantations found through Google until something finally works.
  • JohnFen 3y ago
    Indeed. The #1 thing I need from my platforms is that I don't need to get anyone else's permission to develop and install any programs on it that I wish. That basically rules out Apple and Microsoft.
    • yonatan8070 3y ago
      I say this as a Linux user What do you mean by ruling out Microsoft? You can install and run your own software on Windows?
      • JohnFen 3y ago
        Unless it's a driver. Windows wants those signed by Microsoft. There are ways to get around that, but they're not wonderful. This bit me a month or so ago at work. I don't use Windows at home.
      • apitman 3y ago
        I've run into lots of issues running my programs on Windows. Sometimes it will even delete the executables outright if it decides they are dangerous. This was mostly with networked and virtualization apps.
        • fulafel 3y ago
• frankdenbow 3y ago
  Love this. I recently started working on two apps with this same mindset: I just want to create an app for myself (todo with limits, group chats with content limits). It feels great and is enjoyable even if it doesnt get a million users.
• deleted 3y ago
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• _1tan 3y ago
  Does anyone have a tip for "some kind of modern, flexible HyperCard"?
  • RodgerTheGreat 3y ago
    http://beyondloom.com/decker/ http://beyondloom.com/decker/
• JohnFen 3y ago
  This is the way, for those of us who have the ability and inclination. Software you create for your own use, and the use of your friends and family, is software that is customized for your particular needs and software that you can trust.
• kgritesh 3y ago
  Lovely article and loved the analogy of home cook to making an app. Being a professional programmer who loves programming, I never thought about programming like this. But there is a catch here, I would wager that trying cooking at home is far easier and accessible as compared to making simplest of apps. Most of the no code low-code tools are focused on helping companies make software for their use and not focused on individuals making apps for themselves.
• joshspankit 3y ago
  In order to help unblock everyone from sharing their “home-cooked meal” apps, I’ve submitted an Ask HN to make space for sharing stacks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38878837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38878837 The idea is to allow people to “share ingredients” of internals of projects without the requirement of sharing the code
• namuol 3y ago
  I love writing bespoke software! My little bonus Christmas gift to my parents this year was a kind of Jeopardy clone that uses a dataset of questions from thousands of shows. Watching Jeopardy is a new nightly tradition, but they always complained that they wish they could see the category when the clue is on screen, which is what inspired the project. It’s a full screen PWA and my mom likes to mirror her phone screen to their smart TV to play. There’s no score tracking or sound effects or “multiplayer” because it’s made for the way they like to play. Of course, I can’t distribute it publicly either for copyright reasons, but I wouldn’t want to anyway.
  • noahjk 3y ago
    A lot of the time, the hardest part for these things is finding the dataset (and the hardest part of personal projects in general). How did you curate yours?
    • namuol 3y ago
      You’re spot-on. I may not have started the project if I didn’t know there was a specific decent dataset available. I already knew of a dataset of Jeopardy questions that is somewhat popular in ML circles so I just used that. I believe it’s based primarily on the excellent fan-maintained j-archive website. It’s unclear if the dataset was created with the permission of the j-archive maintainers. I don’t do any real “curation”, I just cache the entire dataset with a web manifest file and do some simple processing on it to find a game with a full set of questions.
• bhpm 3y ago
  This post changed my mind about sideloading on iPhones. Before I read it I was firmly in the camp of “lock it down, so grandma doesn’t get hacked.” But now I just think it stops people from making home cooked meal apps like this. I also think it propagates the notion that computers are magic and should only be programmed by magicians. But no software developer I have ever met has felt this way. I don’t feel this way.
  • chuckadams 3y ago
    I think grandma-mode should still be the default, but with some arcane startup ritual to enable sideloading that you only have to do once, with said process being replete with "HERE BE DRAGONS" warnings. Basically make it more like a mac or a typical chromebook. Pixel phones still let you root them, don't they?
    • supriyo-biswas 3y ago
      You should check out the arguments in Epic vs Google, where an arcane process to sideload apps was used as a data point against Google. By disallowing any exceptions, Apple can make the case that this is simply not a supported feature of their product. The EU DMA and the resulting competition may cause Apple to release a lower priced tier for apps with a smaller distribution, and I look forward to that.
      • dns_snek 3y ago
        > By disallowing any exceptions, Apple can make the case that this is simply not a supported feature of their product. I know that's what the ruling essentially implies, but that doesn't sound like a reality we should be encouraging or even entertaining, IMO. It's a failure of the US legal and antitrust enforcement system if this line of reasoning is accepted, blatantly so in this case. I, for one, hope that Apple is eventually forced to open up their platforms to sideloading worldwide.
    • jwells89 3y ago
      Yes, I don’t know exactly what it’d entail but enabling sideloading really does need to be something that’s sufficiently scary to the non-technical to help curb social engineering by fake “Microsoft support” and such. It’s somewhat painful and inconvenient but the old desktop OS model where arbitrary code can not only be run at a whim, but also gets free reign to do whatever it pleases simply doesn’t scale to the masses. It was a problem even prior to smartphones but has only gotten worse as larger swathes of the population have come aboard.
• Glench 3y ago
  > Update, February 2022: Two years later, my family still uses BoopSnoop every day. I have added one (1) feature, at my mother’s request. What is that one feature I wonder? Robin, you around to answer?
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• onetimeuse92304 3y ago
  I maintain a whole set of services for my family I either implemented myself completely or glued from other sources. We have our own no nonsense chat desktop, web and mobile apps for ios and android. Our own calendar for family events as well as to coordinate daily operations. Our own forum. Our own pages with resources and even our own documentation bot that you can ask pretty ambiguous questions and it can point you to the past posts/documents/chat threads that are relevant (when you don't remember where it was mentioned but you can describe what you are looking for). Even a wall mounted ipad with couple tools that we find useful. Shopping list where you can add stuff for the next shopping run. Voting for meals. Calendar which is especially useful to kids because they can book our time when they need something or they can see when I plan to do my training sessions or when I am or I am not available (I work remotely and don't have set day plan). Recently started spending time with my eldest son to add more features -- any way to get kids hooked up to programming is a win IMO.
• wackget 3y ago
  Do you still need to pay Apple's extortionate $99/year developer fee if you're only developing apps for private/personal use?
  • boxed 3y ago
    Yes. And it's explicitly not allowed to publish in the app store for such a small audience.
    • rhodysurf 3y ago
      Technically you dont need it to develop and app for yourself. Practically the cert expires every 7 days without a dev license so its very annoying without one, vs being able to distribute to people you care about on test flight
• wackget 3y ago
  > I know I ought to pay it forward and publish the code for my app. Even if it doesn’t work for anyone else as-is, it might provide a helpful guide — one I would have been grateful to have. But the code is marbled with application-specific values, well-salted with authentication keys. Meh. Pretty disappointing excuse. Wouldn't take long at all to separate secrets and would make the app inherently more secure anyway.
• kaonwarb 3y ago
  On the truly lightweight end, I find Apple's Shortcuts to be effective for ad-hoc personalized creations. I wanted a simple journaling app which allowed me to just talk, transcribed what I said, and stored it with a timestamp in a text file. Realized I could do all of that quite easily with Shortcuts: I trigger it, talk as long as I want, tap the screen, transcribes (I call an API for better quality), then appends the result to a note with a timestamp. Fast, easy, and it's been reliable. No in-app purchases or ads, either.
• darrinm 3y ago
  This article has been such an inspiration for us at Hatch (https://hatch.one/ https://hatch.one/)! We founded the company as “Personal Software” and we’re working hard to lower the barriers for this kind of creation. The opportunity shouldn't be limited to people who know how to code. Several pieces of the puzzle are in place with more in the pipleine. Here's quick video of getting started creating a web app in 60 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQMFFkCHrdo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQMFFkCHrdo
• Amorymeltzer 3y ago
  Always relevant, always worth reading, but for the two main past discussions here: 2020: 556pts, 132 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22332629 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22332629> 2022: 186pts, 51 comments <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32800518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32800518>
• mooshx 3y ago
  Love this topic, thanks OP! Many years ago I created an iOS bread dough calculator that basically hard-coded the ingredients in percentage form. I used it personally for years to make pizza crusts, etc. all in a scalable format. Once, my wife and I hosted a big "make your own" pizza party and I used the app to create enough dough for 30 or so personal pizzas. Eventually I pushed it forward (thanks to the Unity Engine at the time) and made it a "real" app on the App Store. As others have noted, there's a large gap between bespoke, home-cooked software and commercial choices. As a full-time developer this was a side-project and still suffers, imho, as an under-invested commercial app. The app has had very modest success (pays about the equivalent of one espresso a week) but I still love it. When an app is "just yours" there's an aura of fun about the project that can get stripped away when the trajectory becomes more commercial.
• jerojero 3y ago
  Some time ago I took a sudoku app and added some features that I wanted. It was a great learning experience, my code introduced some bugs and it's not perfect but the whole thing felt really good. Wish android development was a bit more straightforward, I always find it kind of difficult just because of the amount of things that might go wrong. Kinda like coding videogames I guess.
• martinclayton 3y ago
  Dated WBM link to the Clay Shirky blog post in the article: https://web.archive.org/web/20051129091414/http://www.shirky.com/writings/situated_software.html https://web.archive.org/web/20051129091414/http://www.shirky... Must have been taken down from shirky.com since so WBM's last capture is a 404.
• JZL003 3y ago
  I know it's probably in rough shape but I'd like to use this myself, even if it takes a lot of code to modify. I guess I'd need an android app too tho
• totalhack 3y ago
  A friend and I recently created an app to track realtime scores for a high school reunion fantasy draft (we drafted teams with a few friends and you get points if the person shows up). With AI helping it really lowers the barrier to personal or one-off apps you wouldn't otherwise have time for. We did the app in the framework he was comfortable with, which I hadn't used, and I wrote all my code with AI. I got smoked in the game though.
• bsnnkv 3y ago
  I love seeing whenever this is (re)posted. This article had such a huge impact on my life and led to me creating many pieces of software[1][2][3] that were hyper-specific to myself and my needs at the time, which also later found an audience in others who think and work in ways similar to me. [1]: https://notado.app https://notado.app - a "content-first" internet bookmarking and highlighting service which has been my second brain since 2020 after growing frustrated with Instapaper, Pinboard and Readwise. Eventually I expanded this to allow for RSS feed publishing on specific topics in an attempt to solve the "firehose" problem when following other peoples' bookmarks/shares, and at the end of last year I added what is now my most used feature of image generation from highlights for sharing on image-first/text-hostile social media platforms. [2]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi - tiling window manager for Windows. There wasn't really anything fit for purpose on Windows when I started, and I was too spoiled by bspwm and yabai on Linux and macOS that I just had to write something before I could become a truly productive Windows user. I'm astonished that this now has 50k+ downloads. [3]: https://kulli.sh https://kulli.sh - I use this to aggregate comments from HN/Reddit/Lemmy/Lobsters on an article I'm interested in in one place to read. This has helped me find some interesting niche communities on Reddit and Lemmy who share and discuss things I'm interested in that I otherwise wouldn't have found.
  • cxqtheresh 3y ago
    Thanks for sharing about your projects (especially notado and kuli.sh), I would never have heard about it if it weren't for this comment.
• kube-system 3y ago
  It is kind of amusing to see this presented as a novel concept. This is how all software development worked once upon a time. Computers used to ship with BASIC interpreters, not app stores or package managers.
  • pradn 3y ago
    It’s not novel so much as an invitation to do the same.
• Rehanzo 3y ago
  This is super interesting. Took me until nearly the end, when he started talking about how he wouldn't last as a professional software engineer, to find out he isn't one. Great way of looking at programming. It really is just another way to create, akin to drawing or writing, and it feels as if we almost desecrate it by treating it the way we do. Inspiring article.
• alin23 3y ago
  I do this too, I write scripts, and one-file apps that solve issues that only I think I have. Like I've been running an InternetReachable.swift [1] manually at the CLI for months to have a nice visualization of when my internet connection is not actually working. I travel a lot by train, and some regions have spotty 3G. I got tired of looking at `ping 1.1.1.1` output lines until the connection came back. But for whatever reason I get the urge to polish the thing, make a pretty icon for it and publish it in the hope that others might also have the same weird specific need as me. That script above just turned into an app called IsThereNet : https://lowtechguys.com/istherenet https://lowtechguys.com/istherenet I'm not sure why, but I get a little dopamine hit when I see people learning a thing or two from my experiments. I guess that's why we still do the kind of open source that doesn't ask for money. [1] https://gist.github.com/alin23/e15b6ffc62a85790096f0228c54fd31e https://gist.github.com/alin23/e15b6ffc62a85790096f0228c54fd...
  • 2freedi 3y ago
    Thank you very much. A few times I've been out on site and someone will told me that "the internet has gone down." I can easily spend hours offline programming, so this app is perfect for me to keep an eye on it.
• m3kw9 3y ago
  I made a couple apps that only I use and is very niche because probably only I would use it but very helpful.
• Semiapies 3y ago
  > 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. This is actually why I think more people should learn some coding (and why there should be more HyperCard-like environments for non-professionals). It makes the computer or phone a tool to do the things they want, not just what some programmer in SF wanted to write and try to market.
• fuzztester 3y ago
  Related 'Ask HN' that I posted about 3 weeks ago, and that got over 780 comments, with many apps mentioned, which was quite unexpected, but fun: Ask HN: What apps have you created for your own use? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38623695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38623695 Still haven't checked all the replies with links to their apps, which many gave, but plan to.
• philsnow 3y ago
  I self-host a number of things that I've cobbled together in similar fashion for my kids. A while ago I had a bunch of minecraft servers running, when the kids were more into minecraft. There's Vaultwarden, a musescore downloader for my piano-minded kid, a spidered mirror of imgur user ngugi's middle-earth lore posts, an Emby instance populated by both random funny videos I find and also by a cron job that mirrors certain youtube (and other) channels locally so that my kids can watch them without being classified by an algorithm... I don't publish these things for the most part, each of them took between a few hours and a few days' worth of spare time to put together, they're all made without pretension for an audience of 3-4 people only.
• dang 3y ago
  Discussed at the time: An app can be a home-cooked meal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22332629 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22332629 - Feb 2020 (130 comments) Also: An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38856985 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38856985 - Jan 2024 (1 comment) An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32800518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32800518 - Sept 2022 (51 comments)
• sanroot99 3y ago
  I think this kind taste towards developing your own tools forshadow how programming will look like near future. There won't be dozens of abstraction to develop application and there won't be a playstore to hold millions of apps, there would be just a declarative language or Ai that takes human natural language and convert it to it and a black box that takes that declarative recipe and create the precise app according to user need. Instead Programmers there would be just a logicans and blackbox(AI system) that created most optimal way to accomplish the requirements. Creating application will be a end to end experience.
• zubairq 3y ago
  I love this idea! Yes an app can be small and used by a few people! :)
• lwhi 3y ago
  I can't help feeling this is incredibly prescient. Not everyone could be a home cook developer in 2020 .. but in the future, my bet is they will be able to thanks to AI/LLM advances. Maybe we should expect (and are due) a total paradigm shift in terms of digital product consumption?
• dmitkov28 3y ago
  Awesome stuff. This is the type of thing that got me started with programming.
• qwertygnu 3y ago
  Looking for a software job now, I'm wondering if I'm more of a home chef than a commercial cook...But when commercial cooking is fully remote and pays well...what to do...