9/25/26
I’ve read a few great posts recently about the idea of just making software that works for yourself and maybe your community or friends. It doesn’t need to scale. It doesn’t need to be good. It just needs to be there for you when you want it.
The first thing I did in this vein, recently, which is definitely over-engineered is work on my Create my own static site generator. This was inspired by Reed’s: https://henderson.lol/pages/hire/psg.
Today, I read a few great posts on this subject that opened my eyes to other ways you could create software just for yourself and the people around you:
- https://hannahilea.com/blog/houseplant-programming/ - Hannah’s post centers around writing software just for themselves. Like their houseplants, this code isn’t expected to work anywhere else. It’s okay if it needs to be restarted every now and again. It’s alright if some of it doesn’t work out. It’s not a scrappy prototype. It shares characteristics with a first-pass, but it has no ambitions of being the stepping stone to something greater. It’s just meant to work at home and that’s all.
- https://www.todepond.com/pondcast/demo/ - There’s a section of this page about “sharing scrappy fiddles”. This part is the bit that ties into this thread of thought. We should be able to share one-off scrappy bits of code and projects. We shouldn’t need to explain away why they’re not usable by someone else. They don’t need to be production ready.
- https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ - This is a wonderful story about Robin building a simple communication app just for their family. It’s a simple frontend they distribute via test flight on iOS and then host some video files in S3. Some lambdas pass the messages around and that’s it.