AN APP CAN BE A HOME-COOKED MEAL
He Reader,
Today I’d love to share with you one of the best blogposts I’ve ever read. It warmed my heart and inspired me greatly. The blogpost is called "An app can be a home-cooked meal". Give it a read.
It taps into something that’s really close to my heart - using your talents to make a world a better place - starting with your family. While you can be a world-renowned chef, it will always feel different when you cook a meal for your family. There’s some equivalent of this in tech. We carry supercomputers in our pockets, but the idea of building something that your family can use somehow feels... different. Good different. The author puts it really nicely:
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. I can report to you: not only is this different activity rewarding in almost exactly the same way that cooking for someone you love is rewarding, there’s another feeling, too, specific to this realm. I have struggled to find words for this, but/and I think it might be the crux of the whole thing:
This messaging app I built for, and with, my family, it won’t change unless we want it to change. There will be no sudden redesign, no flood of ads, no pivot to chase a userbase inscrutable to us. It might go away at some point, but that will be our decision. What is this feeling? Independence? Security? Sovereignty?
Is it simply … the feeling of being home?
Inspired by this blogpost, I spent last couple of days building a social media app for my family. While I like to humble-brag with everything I put out to the world (in hopes of sharing my knowledge), this time I’m not sharing screenshots, tech stack, or any other details about the app. I cooked this app for the love of my family, for the feeling of connection even though we live miles apart. The app will never have thousands of users, and that’s good. It’s just ours. Just like the meal that mom cooks for us when we gather together as a family.
For the longest time I wanted to build something that we could all share as a family. I lacked the proper skills, or the patience. But I recently started playing with all kinds of tools for building an app. I tried a0.dev that creates mobile apps with Expo. I generated the initial scaffold and then connected database, storage and all other parts using Cursor. I found the experience almost magical, because I realized that we currently live in a golden era of software development. It was never this easy to create something on your own, something you can fully customize and add your own flavor.
I encourage you to cook your own home-cooked meal.
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