This is the way.
Since Claude 3.5 Sonnet has been released I've been building a lot of "microservices" that are just useful to me, or Chrome Extensions that I've seen that I just recreated using Cursor. Awesome learning experience and now I can customize them as needed.
I mean sure it's just a word and HN especially loves to spit on original definitions, but it is always kinda jarring to hear these technical terms in settings that have pretty much no overlap with the original definition.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microapp
having it side by side like that looks really nice if u have the screenspace.
I do the same. Both with software and furniture in my house.
I've built all kinds of little dashboards, a big website software project, a local-only bookkeeping system, etc.
With furniture, I'm not that far that I dare to build a chair or couch, but I've built a bed frame, an over-engineered shoe rack (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXzO8BOIlhk), a weight rack, and now I have some bookshelves in the works.
I don't know if you're Japanese, maybe it's coincidence, but I really get inspired by watching Japanese craftsmen on Youtube. It's not only the techniques or style that I like, but the careful working on something that should last.
Anyway, the hard part about this is that you need a space and then the tools and some tools are easier/cheaper to build than buy (e.g. bandsaw, router table) but there comes a point at which you have to stop building the shop and start building furniture. Most of the YouTubers I follow haven't gotten this message yet...
Not really surprising, the majority of the cost is the actual work. Especially in high-wage countries like the US. Buying a computer to build a website is also much cheaper than getting a website made by someone else.
You might like my Youtube channel then (see previous link). I work in my living room, using my couch and my Ikea stool for basically everything. A lot of cheap hand tools, but I can't work without my drill press. I pick up 2x3's at the local home depot, start sawing and drilling, and mostly use bolts and nuts for connections. Along the way I pick up new power tools, like a portable drill, a dremel, and my newest - a trim router. I built a bicycle caravan, a portable stove, among others. One of the things that really surprised me is the amount of jigs that come to life out of nowhere, haha.
By the way, nice bandsaw you made!
The stuff in furniture stores has like 5 different stages of companies each taking a cut, increasing the price at every step.
Our favorite is "Design Stories" (which used to be "Design Talks Plus") that features many such fantastic Japanese crafspeople. Our family hasn't missed an episode in quite a few years.
And, of course, there is the Canadian resident of Japan, David Bull, who does traditional wood-block prints in the style of the magnificent Hokusai. His attention to detail in his work is inspiring to us as well.
"Japanese Joinery" as a search term yields a near bottomless rabbit-hole of amazingness that hits the perfect intersection of craftsmanship, technology and art for this engineer.
The trick (and somewhat the drawback in many's eyes) is to rent a VPS (or dedicated/bare metal) instead of a "App hosting service" (what Render is). You'd need to know some basics about infrastructure and networking, but not anything too advanced and that's stuff will be useful regardless too, so not too easy to rationalize away :)
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/199617/hostbrr-bf-storage-...
I'm not a programmer by trade but I write tools for myself all the time. My favorite is a wiki-style knowledge base that I built for myself because I did not like the bulk or design of all the existing solutions. (I am a bit picky.) I use it every day for both work and personal stuff. There are lots of ways I want to improve it, but finding the time is difficult.
The costs are minimal (they all run on a shared $4/mo instance + $10/yr domain per project) and I get to control where the data lives, the features I want to have, etc.
No need to worry about getting the rug pulled on me because the company got acquired or needs to raise revenue or anything like that. No frustration because a redesign made the UI worse or removed features I cared about.
It obviously takes a bit of time upfront, but I see it as a long term investment in my productivity. I use boring, basic, stable technologies so once something is deployed it keeps on humming with extremely minimal involvement on my behalf.
I’m basically slowly working on replacing pretty much every 3rd party app I use with something I wrote myself (it’s going to take a while but that’s okay). My grandpa was a carpenter and pretty much every piece of furniture in the house was something he or his friends had made. As software craftspeople, we should strive to do the same with our digital houses.
Kudos to the author and anyone else who does this. You don’t hear about these things in the mainstream because there’s no reason for people doing this to shout it from the rooftops, but this is software at its best.