Top all-time · #359
Robin Sloan
Personal blog · robinsloan.comwritingprogramming
Robin Sloan's personal blog at robinsloan.com covers writing and programming. Since 2009, 147 different Hacker News readers have linked it 223 times, most often “An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 13 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this for 'An App Can Be a Home-Cooked Meal', which commenters use to justify building small software for yourself. Commenters also recommend the Colophon page, the Overworld diary and his novel.
- Recommended for · 13 comments
- Called the writing compelling, well written, beautiful and fun to read; one enjoyed the Colophon page.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The home page of Robin Sloan, author of the novels Moonbound, Sourdough, and Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore.
Most-linked posts?
- An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)48 people · 66 mentions · first linked 2020-02-15
- Writing with the machine9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2016-05-06
- Specifying Spring '837 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2022-06-10
- New Avenues: The platforms of the last decade are done6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2022-12-06
- Orthographic Media5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-08-28
- AGI is here (and I feel fine)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2026-01-05
- AI Art: Notes on a Genre4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-06-06
- Bad Hosts3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-02-11
- Fish: A Tap Essay3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-08-27
- Lost thread (an essay about the decline of Twitter, written before Elon/X)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-04-26
What Hacker News says?
> Don't make enterprise software. Don't write unit tests. Don't accept pull requests. Simply write software for yourself and have fun doing it. Forget refactoring code into modules, just fucking code I've found a really nice perspective on this recently: An app can be a home-cooked meal [1] It's okay to build things that aren't popular, that don't scale, or that aren't economically viable, for the delight of a few u…
Comment linking /notes/home-cooked-app/
on “Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help”Submitted An odd discovery on Spotify as a story · 1056 points
HN discussion> What software would you write if you could write whatever you wanted using whatever language/technology you wanted? The sort that solves problems I'm interested in. I love the idea of treating software as a home-cooked meal [1]: something you prepare with love for a small crowd of people. For instance, I added a recipes section to my personal website. I also added achievements to it some time ago[2]. Both were com…
Comment linking /notes/home-cooked-app/
on “I no longer build software”Submitted An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020) as a story · 1051 points
HN discussionhttps://www.robinsloan.com/img/ghost-variations.jpg Is this related to that thing where one restaurant creates several fake restaurants in food delivery apps?
Comment linking /img/ghost-variations.jpg
on “An odd discovery on Spotify”Submitted An app can be a home-cooked meal as a story · 556 points
HN discussionI enjoyed the "Colophon" page almost as much as the article https://www.robinsloan.com/colophon/ I love the built-in style guide. I'm totally stealing some ideas from that...
Comment linking /colophon/
on “An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020)”Submitted The futures of Facebook and Google are embedded in these two images as a story · 474 points
HN discussionI’m a bit of a hobby coder, and I have enjoyed writing small, home cooked apps ( https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ ) and publishing them as PWAs that my friends and family can enjoy. I can’t justify an annual 99 USD for an Apple developer licence, and my family have a mix of iPhones and Androids. This step makes it much less possible for me to do this kind of “home cooked” development, and it makes m…
Comment linking /notes/home-cooked-app/
on “Apple confirms it's breaking iPhone web apps in the EU on purpose”Submitted The great Miyazaki watch of 2022 as a story · 295 points
HN discussionRobin Sloan has called this “ventilated prose”, a phrase I love. (I seem to recall “aerated prose” having also been deployed) See, e.g., the end of https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/platform-reality/
Comment linking /lab/platform-reality/
on “Thin desires are eating life”Submitted The muscular imagination of Iain M. Banks: a future you might want as a story · 231 points
HN discussionEspecially today, single-user stuff, especially in categories of things like health, especially when you’re writing your own stuff, that’s when you know from the start that scaling doesn’t matter! =] Related, and more powerful than my comments in this thread are going to be: https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
Comment linking /notes/home-cooked-app/
on “Actively exploited sandbox RCE in all Chromium versions”Submitted Is the doc bot docs, or not? as a story · 189 points
HN discussionYep! I'd recommend reading the short story, skipping the novel: https://www.robinsloan.com/books/penumbra/short-story/ I felt like the book was mostly filler added after the popularity of the short story.
Comment linking /books/penumbra/short-story/
on “Julie Rubicon”Submitted An app can be a home-cooked meal (2020) as a story · 186 points
HN discussionSince a little less than two years, I live from a website I built, and I have a lot more control over my schedule. Since then, I built a lot more useless stuff. I'm the only user. I can hardcode things, introduce breaking changes, manually migrate data and so on. I can cut corners, or over-engineer everything. Other people can use it, but I don't care about what they think of my variable names, or which features the…
Comment linking /notes/home-cooked-app/
on “Why I prefer making useless stuff”Submitted What happens when you ask people to pick the lowest unique prime number. as a story · 129 points
HN discussionThe article conveys much the same sentiment as “An app can be a home-cooked meal” https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
Comment linking /notes/home-cooked-app/
on “I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps”Submitted Alien Signals as a story · 127 points
HN discussionRegarding point #2: you can also create for your own pleasure. Not everything has to be a product. Coincidentally, here's a fitting answer to the GP and your comment: https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
Comment linking /notes/home-cooked-app/
on “Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?”Submitted Knowledge and memory as a story · 101 points
HN discussionRelated: "An App Can Be a Home-Cooked Meal" https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/ Discussed here on HN at least twice: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22332629 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38877423
Comment linking /notes/home-cooked-app/
on “Dynamicland 2024”Submitted Voyages in sentence space as a story · 90 points
HN discussionRobin Sloan wrote about something similar a few years back. I think this is one of the most positive things to come out of the current cycle - even if things turn out less revolutionary than sold, enabling regular people to produce something small that sparks joy without having to know a language https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
Comment linking /notes/home-cooked-app/
on “Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale”Submitted An Integration Loop as a story · 84 points
HN discussionAn app can be a home‑cooked meal, by Robin Sloan: https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
Comment linking /notes/home-cooked-app/
on “Do things that don't scale, and then don't scale”Submitted Specifying Spring '83 as a story · 80 points
HN discussionI came to some of these conclusions in 1997: http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/real-news.html In 2008 I savaged Digg and Reddit for the same reasons: http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2008-January... I recommend watching the EPIC 2014 video I allude to in that post; even though it's nine years old and clearly depicts an alternate history at this point, I think its core points have aged well. http://www.…
Comment linking /epic/
on “News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier”Submitted Slow Liquid as a story · 71 points
HN discussion
