It’s such a fun time to have 1+ decade(s) of experience in software. Knowing what simple and good are (for me), and being able to articulate it has let me create so much personal software for myself and my family. It has really felt like turning ideas into reality, about as fast as I can think of them or they can suggest them. And adding specific features, just for our needs. The latest one was a slack canvas replacement, as we moved from slack to self-hosted matrix + element but missed the multiplayer, persistent monthly notes file we used. Even getting matrix set up in the first place was a breeze.
$20/month with your provider of choice unlocks a lot.
Edit: the underlying point being, yes to the article. Either building upon the foundations of open source to making personal things, or just modifying a fork for my own needs.
Couldn't agree more. I'm building open source software for the grid, contributing in a way that feels like it could truly make a difference, while building momentum for open standards. It doesn't feel like work, just creativity and problem solving. On top of that, I can just build stuff for fun. Kids want a Minecraft mod? Let's build it and learn a thing or two on the way.
I have a Synology NAS I can push docker images to. The key is to set up the docker image so it does a git pull on start, that way I just push to Github and restart it.
This was _incredibly_ hard to set up, in a way I did not expect, even with frontier models. It took me 3-4 evenings.
If someone can solve "Heroku for home server" it would open up a world of what HackerNews calls "home cooked" software.
I've been doing JS for nearly a couple decades now (both front and back) and I landed on the same approach a few years ago. Pick your absolutely minimal set of dependencies, and then just make what you need for everything else. Maybe counter-intuitive to some, I feel like I'm more comfortable maintaining a larger codebase with less people.
What's more, given the tools we have today, it fits really well with agentic engineering. It's even easier to create and understand a homegrown version of a dependency you may have used before.
This is probably a semantics problem. You’re right. The models don’t know how to mcp. The harness they run in does though (Claude code, Claude desktop, etc), and dynamically exposes mcp tools as tool calls.
HN loves inventing semantics problems around AI. It's gotten really, really annoying and I'm not sure the people doing it are even close to understanding it.
Nah, these are broad strokes you are painting with. Sure some of them needlessly reinvent, but some back end people needlessly reinvent databases and API basics.
But my experience is not the same. It has always been others telling the front-end devs what we "need" to have. I am constantly pushing back with "buttons and links should look and act like buttons and links", "right clicks don't belong in CRUD apps", and "we have a select component that does that". But _BUSINESSES_ want their identity and unique perspective baked into the app.
There is similar reinventing trends movement also in the backend universe.
For example, there is a fashion [1] to include hashes in the names of static assets served. But that's what ETag header is invented for, in the RFC since a decade and implemented in all browsers.
[1] (I deliberately call it a fashion, not a standard; would rather say that RFC 7232 is a standard in this particular case)
It's the boot camp point I think, over-represented in FE (but I haven't done a survey and not GP, just my impression) perhaps because it's more tangible/accessible - 'oh yeah I'll learn to make websites'.
Or perhaps just that it skews young, which I could believe, and might be easier to find survey data on.
I have a very similar story. I spent many many evenings in my teens learning to “script” with Taran’s Sphere Scripting For Dummies website and .chm file for the Sphere Server UO emulator.
Best part is I didn’t even realise I was programming. In my mind I was just making the game do what I wanted.
We used to gargle water mixed with potassium permanganate as children after cleaning our teeth to see if we did a good enough job. It would colour plaque pink, so it was very obvious if you hadn't cleaned properly!
$20/month with your provider of choice unlocks a lot.
Edit: the underlying point being, yes to the article. Either building upon the foundations of open source to making personal things, or just modifying a fork for my own needs.
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