My answer to this question got to the top of the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29625625 It was a hurried response for sure, but I guess it was still a nice reminder

I really like your “home cooking” analogy and frequently share a very similar one regarding cooking that I think goes one step further. The issue with “home cooking” as a goal is that in relation to computing most people are consumers/diners/users and not programmers/chefs. So it’s not that we need more programmers and home chefs, I think the problem is that the gap between a home chef and a restaurant owner is so massive and exists the same way in software. To extrapolate, let’s consider an example: You’re a talented home cook that has an awesome new dish that you have perfected and want to share with the world. Great! Now how can you actually do that? You basically have two main options: 1. Publish your recipe online (equivalent to open-sourcing on Github) Pros: - Free to distribute - Unlimited reach Cons: - Your users have be a home-cooks themselves to consume the recipe - You don’t make any money 2. Start your own restaurant and serve your dish to patrons (equivalent to creating your own SaaS startup) Pros: - You actually make money - Your users can be anyone (no cooking required) Cons: - Extremely costly and risky to pursue - Requires many more skills and responsibilities to pursue (like hiring staff, renting a space, accepting credit cards, supply chain optimizing, etc) - Limited initial scale (usually just one location to start) So what if there was a third option... What if every person had their own personal chef that could make any recipe your request and shop for the required ingredients on your behalf... We wouldn’t need to rely on restaurants to enjoy highly skilled culinary creations. This would be awesome but clearly unfeasible in this cooking example but is entirely feasible in the software space. If each person had their own personal server, we could build and share full stack apps (and monetize them!) without having to build VS-funded software services. I’m currently working on this project with the aim to allow us “home cooks” to build apps for each other without storing each others data but also make those easy to use for the people that just want to eat and not cook. We’re doing this by creating a space for general purpose personal cloud computing that developers can target and user can install with just one-click.

Sounds like sandstorm.io? I was recently reminded of it..

Yes a similar idea with more of a focus on developer experience and end-user-programming

That's an interesting take 😄 I'm curious to hear more about how you're thinking about it.

I'll add my usual complaint about the term "end user". It implies an industrialized production system in which there are a few developers and a large number of users, with an enormous gradient of expertise and agency. The group of people I see as being left out are the craftspeople who use industrially produced components and tools to create situated artefacts. People who have more domain competence than the upstream designers of components of tools, but less knowledge about low-level details, optimization techniques, etc. An analogy from cooking could be the staff of a hostel or cafeteria.

@Konrad Hinsen in the computing metaphor would this be more like Sysadmins and back-office developers? One product decision we’ve made is that every app built on our platform has a generated REPL/terminal, so if you want more precision you can drop into that instead of using a GUI. This also enables cross-app workflows e.g. you could write a command like “focus 45” that would put a 45 min block on your calendar and mute your notifications for that duration. In general the above is totally doable in your OS if you only use local, native apps but doesn’t work when you are using SaaS or cloud based tools. So we aim to centralize your cloud apps on to one generalized platform so we can bring back writing programs yourself without needing to reach for yet another service like Zapier.

Sysadmins and back-office devs would be part of that group, but it would also include many professionals whose job description does not (for now) directly refer to computing. Much like we have "computational scientists" already, I expect there will be "computational architects", "computational luthiers" and many others in a future that creates a space for them. That's where the cooking analogy fails: computation can/should be a medium rather than a technology, in a way that cooking can't be.

@Srini K I like your list, I think it converges with many aspects of a list if I would create one. I do really like web3 because from my perspective its much more of a projection space in which we can shape technology in a more humane way. Thank you @Konrad Hinsen for pointing out that "Enduser" - Conceptual Problem. There is something to be said about how we use words, even in our tiny subculture here at FoC. In the end I think it comes down to that we are at a point where we would want to change these (like with End User here in our example) , further down the road there ware interesting inqueries into concepts such as Sovereignty. I still like this web3 course where such concepts are discussed but also explored: https://kernel.community/en/learn/module-4/governance