Handmade Software is not for Everyone | Hacker News Reader

Handmade Software is not for Everyone

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3 pointscivilframe6 comments

What kind of software do you envision being created with App Factory? If you can create a system that is both easy for non-technical users and yet powerful enough to make something genuinely useful, I'm all for that. I would love a non-suck variation of the Wordpress/Drupal plugin ecosystem, which is what this most sounds like. What I would be afraid of is the compounded complexity inherent to writing real software systems. That is a really hard problem to solve. One I don't personally think can be solved until AI has reached a certain level.

I agree. It's a daunting challenge. My vision for App Factory is for it to make custom apps of low to medium complexity, for individuals and small/medium businesses. So probably nothing enterprise-level. For personal apps, think... Travel Adventure Log, House Shopping List, Stamp Collection. For business apps, think... Golf Course Management, Research Log, Request/Approval System. The possibilities are many.

If you're thinking... I can do all this with a spreadsheet, consider this. A house shopping app. Sure, it can be done with a spreadsheet. But wouldn't it be more intuitive to have an orderable list of houses with an image, a mini Google Map with it's location, and details that are important to your decision making? Making a simple app like that would be trivial with App Factory. It might take you 15 minutes to slap together a blueprint to do that. Then spin up an instance of the app, and you're good to go. All through a web interface.

Yeah, it sounds great and definitely would fill a need. I know a lot of non-devs who are trying to do their own thing using Wordpress and its just non-stop pain and frustration, so they ask me to help out sometimes. I will keep an eye on your progress.

Thanks for the vote of confidence :-)

The car analogy is false.

Buying a mass produced car isn't the same as "rolling your own" from pieces.

And it sort-of has its software equivalent in creating a blog and choosing a theme and a couple of plugins, maybe.

Besides, as far as the "masses" are concerned, software choices are more plentiful and cheap than ever.

So why would the go out of their way, to make apps?

I guess you could have said the same thing about websites 5-10 years ago. Why would anyone bother wanting to make their own website, when there are so many web designers out there, who work for cheap?

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