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.

I have several 'home-cooked' apps. One is our shopping list. I have a Pi with a touchscreen in the kitchen running it, and it's easy for us both to add to from there. I also built in functionality so that if we're using a recipe from the web, we can share it to the screen, which is neat.

We can also access the shopping list on our phones while shopping. I built a feature that sorts the products by aisle (specific to our local supermarket), making it easier to do the shop easily/quickly.

I'm sure there are commercial (not even paid neccessarily) apps that do all this, but this one is used only by us and it's built to perfectly interact with our lives and circumstances:

* Things are hard-coded that would make no sense in a publicly available app, or would be very difficult to build customisation for. Hardcoding things is easy, building UI is hard. We're so used to building things in the commercial space for scale we forget how easy it is to build small things that will never need to scale beyond a userbase of 1-2.

* It has remained almost entirely unchanged in UI and features for ~10 years now. Can you say that of any other piece of software you use on a daily basis?

> In a better world, I would have built this in a day, using some kind of modern, flexible HyperCard for iOS.

>

> 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.

Are you listening, Apple?

In my family home growing up, me and my sister had our bedrooms upstairs while the dining/living rooms were downstairs. When it was dinner time, my mother would yell out "Dinners ready!" up the staircase - often to deaf ears, as us young teens were pre-occupied with loud music, gaming or talking on the phone.

After coming down one-to-many times to a cold dinner, I developed my first "app" with MIT App Inventor - Dinners Ready, an app with three buttons: "kid A", "kid B", and a larger "Both". Pressing a button would send a simple text message saying dinner is ready.

My mum loved it. Suddenly she didn't have to worry about fruitlessly yelling to her distracted kids. I wouldn't have to rely on my grumbling stomach to come downstairs to an empty dining table with my food going cold. We used it for years, and she still brings it up from time to time. To this day it remains my most well-reviewed app with 100% happy users.

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.

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.

I very much enjoy this post. My first introduction to Robin Sloan was via the novel Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. It featured Ruby programming as a central part of the plot. Ruby! Programming languages, and coding, in a novel? What a wonderful thing to find. I wish him great success.

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.

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.

Home cooked apps FTW! It’s honestly such a joy to program stuff for you and the people you love and remove the expectation of it doing well in some arbitrary market

Related:

An app can be a home-cooked meal - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22332629 - Feb 2020 (130 comments)

I really enjoyed the article. I've several personal apps, and as with home cooked meals, I've a favorite 'home-cooked app' that I iterate on more than others.

Famnom evolved from spreadsheets, to python scripts, to a web-only django app hosted locally, to a web + ios + android client apps. I find it useful daily, and it has a few other regular users (besides my family), though arguably my family are my toughest users :).

I have a similar story. I had an itch about improving my communications and scratched it. My biggest issue was the App Store itself and I documented my start at https://medium.com/@mtc.dev/my-first-android-app-story-331c9....

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.

I just wanted to say that this article fits with my personal experience so well, so refreshing. I love messing with code and different technologies, but mostly I really only want to please myself or family members with my creations. To be relieved of the need to feel professional in my endeavour is enlightening.

I was surprised that it was Robin Sloan the author who did this - building an app of that sophistication is no mean feat for someone who’s not a professional.

His books are excellent. I highly recommend both Penumbra’s 24 Hour Book Store and Sourdough.

I find it interesting that I seem to have a different takeaway from most of the other commenters here.

I assume HN is dominated by professional programmers? Id assume the reactions would be different in a demoscene or raspberry pi forum?

For me this is what I like about open source software. It's a home cooked meal that the chef has shared. It's not trying to please every one, it's written by the author for the author.

Both activities have creative elements, and a "what happens if" element. And I can certainly see the sharing motivation for both.

I made a micro-journaling web app that has three total users (my mother, my friend, and me), and only one weekly active user (me): https://joyjar.zachgarwood.com

It looks kinda goofy and wouldn't hold up to a large userbase, but it was fun to write, and it's nice to have something that does exactly and only what I want it to do.

I like the learn to cook analogy. It's perfect.

Also a good retort to the whole "you don't need to go to a famous culinary school to ger hired as a chef".