An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)

This is poetry. I have been working on a personal project for the last 10 years that replaces every other app I used to use - E-mail, calendar, and all the others we all use on a daily basis - and every time someone sees me using it they ask "Wow, this is amazing, how do I download it!?", and the answer is always the same: you don't. There's a beauty to engineering something having yourself as the target user…

Recently I wanted to make a few simple apps that would make api requests and control a few things around my house set up with raspberry pis. A friend recommended me the drag and drop app builder Thunkable[1] and I was blown away by just how easy it was to make something. In a couple of hours I had all the apps I needed. No complicated build process, just download the apk from the site. Some people might turn their…

Wow, this article hits home. Recently my wife and I were admiring the full moon, and she wondered aloud how many moons we'd been together and said, "maybe you should use your programming stuff to find out." A month later I surprised her with a home cooked Android app called RacoonMoon. It features a random picture of us, and along with some very cheesy love messages and inside jokes, says how many moons we've been together. It barely works, and…

I write little scripts and programs on my computer, all the time, to simplify tasks or take care of something I find annoying. Every once in a while I'll want to do something similar on my phone, and decide I should set up Android Studio. I used to think that FPGA development environments had the most bloated, convoluted, and unintuitive development environments possible, but then I tried Android Studio. Every time I try to get it going, I spend several…