Build a world. Make your projects and work a vessel for self-expression. Make your software match your vibe. Make reading your book feel like it feels to talk with you. Customize, make it bespoke, put yourself into it instead of doing what you feel you should. This has all kinds of benefits (reducing burn out for instance) but especially helps with... See more

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

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