Robin Sloan
1979–
Sloan writes novels about secret societies of bread bakers, and essays about why your software should feel like a home-cooked meal. Both pursuits are about the same thing: making things at a human scale, for specific people, with care.
Home-Cooked Software
In his 2020 essay “An App Can Be a Home-Cooked Meal,” Sloan argued that not all software needs to scale. A program written for your family, your neighborhood, your specific situation — this is as valid as a program written for millions of users. Maybe more so.
Home-cooked software doesn’t need to be beautiful or 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.
This is how Thistlebridge thinks about its own tools: the morning station, the kitchen station, the focus timer. Specific tools for specific contexts, made by and for the people who use them.
The Penumbra
Sloan’s fiction (Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Sourdough) explores the tension between digital and analog, ancient and modern, scaled and intimate. His characters keep finding that the most powerful technologies are the oldest ones — bread-making, typography, fermentation — augmented rather than replaced by the new.
Key Works
- “An App Can Be a Home-Cooked Meal” (2020)
- Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore (2012)
- Sourdough (2017)
Connections
- appropriate-technology — home-cooked software is appropriate technology
- human-scale — built for specific people, not abstract users
- Ursula K. Le Guin — parallel suspicion of scale
- replication-not-scaling — recipes propagate, franchises scale
- embodied-knowledge — Sloan’s fiction centers hands-on craft
“An app can be a home-cooked meal. An app can be a home-cooked meal!”