🐴 Thank you, soupault
☀️ You probably don’t need a theme toggle

Some General Thoughts

I’ve been experiencing software for most of my life, from neopets to netflix and I’ve also been building it for a while now. I have a lot of love for the practice; it’s a craft, it’s a way that I play, and it’s also what pays the bills. Despite this, there are many things about modern software that I do not like 😔

1. Gains in available computing resources have created a lack of mindfulness around utilization. Much like a certain set of constraints enables great art – resource constraints (even artificially imposed) enables great software and we’re running out of constraints.

2. The ubiquity of frameworks that are pedaled, adopted, and discarded is a distraction from writing great software. Frameworks are not tools, they are paradigms - undermining our goals for our software in their quest for dominance of the ecosystem. Tools say - “I’m here to help” while frameworks say “Join or die!”

3. Both the surveillance economy and the attention economy which software enable should not be normalized. Remember - if something’s free, you are the product.

All this said, there’s still great software out there! 🥳 A short list of my favorite software out there these days:

• soupault.app - tool that helps me make this static site!
• lichess.org - free forever from donations
• sr.ht - the hacker’s forge

These are all great because they’re free (though please support software you use!), they’re open source, and they provide a great user experience – which is the golden standard of software.