Robin Sloan

I have a bunch of these. They are my favorite things to make. I've been making things like this for a long time but I only recently started to appreciate them after discovering this article. https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

- I have a disability and require daily personal care so I made a system for recruiting and hiring caregivers. (https://blakewatson.com/journal/a-home-cooked-app-for-hiring-personal-caregivers/)

- I need to track those caregivers' hours so I can make sure timesheets are accurate, and I wanted to do it with minimal effort. So I created a plain text syntax readable by a web app I created that takes that syntax and outputs exactly what should go on the timesheets.

- Sometimes the government agency that runs the program doesn't send me enough timesheets, so I created a "forgery" of their timesheets in CSS where all of the values are interchangeable via JavaScript. Now I can print any timesheet for any one of my caregivers for any time period on demand.

- I made my own web-based bookmarking tool to replace my Pinboard account. It automatically sends every bookmark to the Wayback Machine. (I wrote about that one and a couple of others https://blakewatson.com/journal/the-joys-of-home-cooked-apps/)

- Sadly I'm no longer able to use this one because of decreasing strength, but I once created a custom mobile-based keyboard for typing on my Mac. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pre6EQGIuKY

- I wanted to be able to share my plain text notes so I…

> In my opinion there are very few goals where "having a blog" is the right answer.

My blog has sections for articles and tutorials, even a section for documenting how broken a lot of the software out there is and I'd say that overall it's been a pleasant experience throughout the years. On one hand, it helps me jot down how to do certain things in a structured way, other times to practice expressing my views and experiences in a reasonably structured way and to just get better at writing.

I recall someone saying the following in a conference, which stuck with me (paraphrasing): "If you write something down and nobody ever reads it, those keypresses are sort of wasted."

So, I occasionally write. A lot of it is sub par but has resulted in a few job offers (which I admittedly didn't take at the time), or just nice e-mail conversations with other people. Here's a brief look at the blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/

As for personal sites, while I don't see myself having one of those super artistic portfolio sites that some lovely people out there do, I at least have a way of writing down some of the things that I've worked on over the years, my views, others' feedback and so on: https://kronis.dev/

Is it a super optimized and effective way at getting income, job interviews, clout or whatever people care about? Not really. Could someone call it a waste? Sure, but then again, a lot of the stuff we do as human beings is a bit of a waste when you think about it: watching shows or…

I would love to see an actual business modeled after The Black Danube, in Robin Sloan's novella Annabel Scheme: http://robinsloan.com/annabel-scheme (Read the whole thing, it's an awesome story)

Directly from the book (don't worry, it's CC):

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They showed me a coffee shop stretched out to warehouse scale. There was a long, foreshortened espresso counter up front. The rest of the concrete floor was dotted with wooden tables, dozens of them, all different shapes, spaced evenly through the field of gray. Every single one was occupied. Men in shiny suits and long coats—one in white New Fleet livery—milled from table to table like customers at a flea market.

[...]

All of the tables at this coffee shop were reserved for new internet companies. The price was a nine percent stake in your new venture, but you’d happily give nineteen or ninety-nine. With a table, you got, in addition to the simple, precious space: a thick, luxurious fiber-optic connection to the internet; a server or two or sixteen in the data center next door; and, most important by far, the attention of Octav Erdos.

I saw him at a table near the front. He was tall and wide, bald, wearing gray overalls. He could have been an auto mechanic. He was blustering at the semicircle of skinny faces around the table, tracing his fingers in little spirals, drawing something in the air. Everyone was nodding.

Octav was more than an espresso impresario. He was also the director of Black Danube Ventures, and he spent…

Glad you took it in the stride... I wasn't trying to be harsh.

TBH, I think it is worthwhile to build an app for yourself first. For a user base of n=1. You might have heard of the Barefoot Developer by Maggie Appleton[1], and also by Robin Sloan[2]. I subscribe to that point of view.

I actually like your app idea.. mainly because of my workouts.
Except that for my purposes I would want to build one with my analytics in consideration. I am currently noodling over the idea (among my several side projects)

[1] https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software

[2] https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/

Author here. FWIW I 100% agree with your assessment. This would be a horrible choice for anything resembling production code and I hope nobody considers it. I'm not really even sure I'd recommend anybody other than me use the language for anything; there are a lot of decisions informed by how I, specifically, think about and write code. For me, this language works well when I want to write scripts that are <100 lines or so, and for that alone I think it's achieved its purpose. I think of it as a "home-cooked" programming language, a la <https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/>.

The author (of both the book in the demo and this software itself) is Robin Sloan. He publishes a couple email newsletters, all of which I recommend. Most recently he's been writing a development diary for a video game he's working on[0]. He published a handful of GPT-2 generated city descriptions based on a corpus of fantasy literature that was a lot of fun[1]. There's great content about the illustration style as well[2]. I recommend the follow.

[0] https://www.robinsloan.com/overworld/
[1] https://www.robinsloan.com/overworld/week/5/
[2] https://www.robinsloan.com/overworld/week/3/