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463 points 8organicbits | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.203s | source
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sReinwald ◴[] No.44308465[source]
The core vision here is something I can absolutely get on board with, but the execution fundamentally seems to misunderstand why "home-cooked software" doesn't exist.

The target audience problem is immediately apparent: they're building a product for people who can write JavaScript event handlers but somehow can't 'npx create-react-app'. This demographic is approximately twenty-seven people.

More critically, they've confused the problem space, in my opinion. The barrier to personal software isn't the lack of drag-and-drop of JavaScript environments. It's that software, unlike a meal or a home-made sweater, comes with an implicit support contract that lasts forever. When I cook dinner for friends, I'm not on the hook when they're hungry again next Tuesday. When my grandma knits a home-made sweater, she's not expected to keep supporting it in case I want to add a hood.

When the attendance counter has a race condition and the venue goes over capacity, guess who's getting the angry call when the fire marshal shows up for an inspection?

The "redistributing the means of software production" rhetoric rings particularly hollow from what appears to be a proprietary SaaS in the making. You don't democratize software by creating another walled garden. And their claim about "owning your data" while simultaneously offering real-time sync is either technically naive or deliberately misleading. How is the attendee counter example's counter state shared between users, if the data lives in local storage? I don't see how you can have both without server infrastructure that they control.

The actual nearest thing to their vision already exists and has millions of users: Spreadsheets. Non-technical people build complex, business-critical "applications" in spreadsheets every day. No JS required, local-first, and everyone already knows how to use it. But "we made a worse Excel" doesn't sound as revolutionary, I suppose.

The real unsolved problem isn't making it easier to create small apps - I build small tools for myself all the time. It's making them sustainable without creating permanent maintenance burdens. And that is not something you can solve with a new framework or SaaS - it's at it's core, a social issue.

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parpfish ◴[] No.44310173[source]
i'd argue that the biggest hurdle to home cooked software is finding a way to distribute/deploy it among your friends. im a backend guy and can easily make a useful li'l executable to run on my work machine. but how do i share that with people that will only use their smartphone for computing?

i either have to: - make something browser-based, register a domain, and then pay somebody to host it. that's a lot of hoops (and unnecessary cost) just to access a little script that's just fine running locally. - make some sort of official developer account[0] for an app store and then jump through hoops to get my app approved. this would let me make a little app that runs locally, but it's even MORE hoops to jump through and it puts you on the hook for support because it's a wide public release instead of just sharing with a couple friends.

[0] tbh, I don't know how this works. I just hear mobile devs complaining about submitting apps for review and know it can be slow and frustrating.

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1. trinix912 ◴[] No.44312741[source]
The easiest I can think of is making a spreadsheet. Share an Excel file over OneDrive or even a Google Sheet. The built-in features/formulas are enough for most of these use cases; if you want to go further, there's VBA (and the nightmare that comes with it - but it's less of a nightmare than paying and setting up a domain and dealing with the security of that).

I know several people who do that - non-programmers - with formulas and VBA in Excel sheets.