Chefs also come back home and cook for their family and friends. Family & friends look forward to the cooking on the weekend, the “specials” with great excitement. It is a place where there is love & gratitude. No pressure to deliver award winning recipes, just a good meal with jokes and banter. I think there is something beautiful in that.
A lot of Software engineers seem to have gotten into this mentality where things have almost always become about scale. Scale in terms of users & scale in terms of feature set.
Once in a while it is good to just build for ourselves, to build for friends and family. Something which is personal, predictable, customized. Something which is minimal & clean. Not after money, not after popularity & fame, not after hype cycles. Just for us. It is like a spicy recipe toned down for the family.
With the state of things in open source and AI, it’s much more easier to build home grown software. Engineers should get back to building things for themselves & friends. There is no guilt in building something which is just being used by a handful of people. And it is a testament to the beauty of the mature structure and ecosystems we have around us.
Inspired by Robert Sloan’s beautifully written post called “An app can be home-cooked meal”