Robin Sloan's Boop Snoop

This 2020 piece from Robin Sloan entitled An App Can Be a Home-Cooked Meal really hit the spot for me today. In it, he describes the process of developing an app he created for his family called BoopSnoop. You can't install it. No one can except his family members.

It's a charming story but his insight at the end discussing how writing code and learning to cook are similar really struck me.

When you liberate programming from the requirement to be professional and scalable, it becomes a different activity altogether, just as cooking at home is really nothing like cooking in a commercial kitchen. I can report to you: not only is this different activity rewarding in almost exactly the same way that cooking for someone you love is rewarding, there’s another feeling, too, specific to this realm.

Perfectly succinct, insightful and exactly how I feel.