Home-Cooked Apps

Rach Smith recently posted about her building home-cooked web apps. I think it’s an interesting and fun thing to do.

We all have our ways of doing things. Sometimes it’s analog, sometimes it’s digital. And in many cases, there’s not necessarily that one app or that one tool that does exactly what you want it to just the way you want it to. Often you’re left with trying to shoehorn a solution into something that is close to what you’re looking for. It might be good enough, it might still leave you wanting more.

For software developers, that might open things up for us to create our own solutions that fit our own needs.

Just about every side project I’ve started on stemmed from a need I wanted in my own life. I wanted a better way to organize and manage my media and links? I built my media repository. I wanted a better way to share recipes with my wife? I started to build digital family cookbook.

I started several projects and didn’t really complete a lot of them. I joke about it sometimes, but I think part of it is that when I started building them, I started too large. Instead of building them just for me, I started to build them thinking that others might want to as well. It caused me to start at a grander scale which I think doomed them.

What I should have done is build them for me, and only me from the beginning. Build the tools to suit my own specific needs. I can have fun building it. I can build it the way I want. The code can be as clean or as hacked together as I want...but hopefully the former. I do have some pride after all. Either way, the final product is my own and I can be as creative or as functional as I want.

For what it’s worth, I do have the code for my media repository on GitHub. Anyone is free to fork it and modify it to suit their needs. I just won’t be taking any pull requests as it’s really only for me.