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Great article, from an age where so much was new and exciting (in maybe good ways). Robin Sloan a couple years latter with "home cooked software" comes to mind. It's very down scoped, individual, where as situated software can still be somewhat broad scale. https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22332629 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32800518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38877423 Then recently, Maggie Appleton's Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers has been very popular & recurring, which talks to how much more accessible it is to build your own home-cooked software, in this LLM age. https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jul/6/home-cooked-software/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40633029 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45490737 To ramble off the beaten path a little, it'a a bit unfortunate to me that this all has to be its own class of software. Ideally I'd love to see existing systems and software be better able to be resculpted and shaped by the users, to be flexed into new forms. Accessibility people in particular have a huge edge up here, with much more enriched views of whats on the screen/page, but generally it feels like software wants to be left alone, wants to be what it is (an ego). And that's never felt very "soft". Malleable Software / Malleable Systems would let us better situated our software to the time places and forms of use it finds itself in, would make software better embody the soft. Hoping for more. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=malleable https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/malleable-software/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44237881 https://malleable.systems/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22857551 Situated software ought be less of its own distinct class, and more what we can do with the many many soft malleable bits of software about us. Perhaps scripted, plugin-ed, or cooked or glued together via LLM help. |