Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

"People need not only to obtain things; they need above all the freedom to make things among which they can live, to give shape to them according to their own tastes, and to put them to use in caring for and about others."

With all due respect, we have it pretty good. Our problems are boring.

And the way we fund this is primarily through US-based venture capital funding, which demands hockey stick growth in return.

All the focus goes into making hundreds of millions or ideally billions of dollars in profit to pay back their investors.

As a member of a team that's in the middle of doing this, I can say it affects every single decision abou... See more

How could an American getting paid six figures in Mountain View understand how to identify problems and design solutions for a homemaker in Tokyo, a street seller in Turkey, or a doctor in Tunisia?

For the most part, they don’t. Or if they try, they do it badly.

The dream was that communities would get very form-fit tools for their particular needs, rather than trying to adapt generic software to solve them.

My friend Kasey Klimes wrote a fantastic piece called “

When to Design for Emergence

” on the design dynamics of large-scale software after working on Google Maps.

https://newsletter.rhizomerd.com/p/when-to-design-for-emergence

He points out that our current approach is designed to only solve the most common needs of the most number of users.

Anything b... See more

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 know everyone here knows what local-first is about, but here's a quick recap for people watching who might not.

When we talk about “local-first,” we’re primarily talking about where data lives and how it syncs to our devices.

So in the old school world, before the cloud, our data and our software lived on a single machine and we had no way to colla... See more