(2023-11-16) Schroeder Personal Software

Alex Schroeder on Personal software. Wondering about people writing the software for their personal site – a blog or a wiki or a digital garden or a Zettelkasten – running software the authors wrote themselves or got from a friend.

Sometimes I hear of “opinionated” software.

what happens if the software turns out to be something the author of a site wrote for themselves? It’s more than opinionated. It’s personal.

If you’re wondering why the list is small, the explanation is that personal tools are not tidied up and yet we live in a world of software that is written for being shared.

In the private world, public code is polished in order to reflect well on programmers and their abilities. But night software is not like that. It’s not written for the day job. It’s not written to see the light of day at all. It’s not written to be looked at and scrutinized by anybody. It’s intimate and personal, it’s messy and buggy. To take a look is to transgress.

And yet, this software offers the unique chance of being the kernel of convivial software: a tool that we can not only learn how to use but that we can disassemble and reassemble. (Tools For Conviviality)

We can imagine little computer clubs discussing our tools, showing how we added this feature or that feature. It is possible because the tools are small.

I’d love to show the world the unpolished, “just good enough with a number of bugs I know of” solutions. Let me know if you have one.