An app can be a home-cooked meal

I am the program­ming equiv­a­lent of a home cook.

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.

This is fantastic: An app can be a home-cooked meal by Robin Sloan.

I had a fantastic conversation with Jem Sophia today (our first actual conversation after years of talking online!) who pointed me in the direction of this fantastic article. I love the sentiment and the metaphor. Creating software to scratch an itch without any ambitions of ScAlInG and turning it into a capitalistic enterprise.

This sentiment — while not identical — reminds me of an older fantastic article The Local Shops of the Web by Rachel Andrew:

A local shop is part of an ecosystem — here in England we call it the High Street. The owner of a local shop generally has no ambition to become a Tesco or WalMart. She’d rather experience steady growth, building relationships with customers who value what she brings to the community.

Not every piece of software needs to be done At Scale. You can just create things to scratch a personal itch, create a bit of fun, make things a little easier on yourself and friends, or to create a small-ish business that isn’t intended to grow exponentially.
As I’ve been delving into AI tools, I’ve found myself making a lot of software that can be described as home-cooked meals:
I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting with the latter and in the last year I’ve created Chrome extensions, Figma plugins, Storybook plugins, node servers, and a bunch of other stuff that I wouldn’t have had the patience and know-how to do without the assistance of AI tools.
I genuinely don’t know if the code that underpins a lot of my creations is of high quality or would work for others — I don’t know if my cooking’s any good. But whatever. It’s doing what I need it to do, and that’s fine by me.
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