Home-cooked web apps

I’d share screenshots of these things, but one of the primary reasons I’ve been enjoying myself so much while making them is because they are literally only for me to see or use. I’ve gone through creative periods where I’m coding outside of work but in the end it has always been shared to some kind of audience - whether that be the designing and coding of this site or my CodePens. This is different.

Robin Sloan coined these type of apps as home-cooked. Following his analogy, technically I am a professional chef but at home I’m creating dishes that no one else has to like. All the stuff I have to care about at work - UX best practices, what our Community wants, or even the preferences of my bosses and colleagues re: code style and organisation can be left behind. I’m free to make my own messed-up version of an apricot chicken toasted sandwich, and it’s delicious.

I’ve been doing the same lately, largely driven by how easy it is to get these home-cooked apps off the ground using LLMs.

My favorite one so far is a tool for helping me manage my sound and public address duties for our local high school’s soccer games. I whipped up a form which lets me set some variables (opposing team name, referees, etc.) and it spits out the script I need to read.

It also contains a mini sound board to easily play stuff like the school’s fight song when they score.

I hope nobody else ever needs to use this thing because it’s certainly janky as all hell, but it works exceedingly well for me.