“An App Can Be a Home-Cooked Meal”
Robin Sloan, 2020
The essay that gave permission to make software for three people.
Sloan’s argument: not all software needs to scale. Not all apps need millions of users. A program written for your family — to manage your garden, to track your recipes, to play a specific game at Thanksgiving — is as valid as a program written for the world.
Home-cooked software doesn’t need to be beautiful, general, or maintainable by strangers. It needs to work for the people it’s for. Like a home-cooked meal, its value is in its specificity and in the care of the person who made it.
Why It Matters
The software industry’s default assumption is that software should scale. If it can’t serve millions, why build it? Sloan’s essay punctures this: because it serves your people. Because making it teaches you things. Because the world needs more home cooking and less fast food, in software as in everything else.
Every tool Thistlebridge builds is home-cooked software: the morning station, the kitchen station, the cooking mentor, this arboretum. Specific tools for specific contexts, made by and for the household.
Connections
- Robin Sloan — author
- appropriate-technology — home-cooked software is appropriate technology
- human-scale — built for specific people
- replication-not-scaling — recipes replicate; restaurants scale
- conviviality — home-cooked software is convivial by nature
“An app can be a home-cooked meal!”