Sixteen years later, in 2020, Robin Sloan published a blog post called “An App Can Be a Home-Cooked Meal” which picked up on many of the same themes.

He talked about building a tiny app for his family to send short videos to one another. Only his family have access. He’s not going to turn it into a start-up. It doesn’t have any commercial or market... See more

I made a messaging app for, and with, my family. It is ruthlessly simple; we love it; no one else will ever use it.

When you liberate programming from the requirement to be general and 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... See more