Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers

Aaron Boodman on Twitter / X

There is this tension in dev tooling right now: Lots of people want to self-host, and not depend on a service. Lots of people also want the vibes of open source - being part of an open development community, having the code, etc.But builders still need to make a living...— Aaron Boodman (@aboodman) January 23, 2024

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open S…

An inside look at modern open source software developer…

Cracks in Containerized Development

Nerd rants about developing software in isolation from the home system; toolbx, distrobox, devcontainers, nix, etc

The Missing Middle of Open Source

Why serious, maintainer-driven projects struggle to sustain themselves—and what it will take to fix it.

Local-First Landscape

A podcast about local-first software development.

From Volunteer Gardening to Building Next-Gen Distributed Web Apps: My Journey to Holochain App…

A story about discovering community, a mind-warping internet paradigm and a global network of unconventional software engineers.

The Architecture Of Local-First Web Development — Smashing Magazine

An honest perspective on building local-first web apps in 2026, written for developers who’ve been doing this long enough to be skeptical of silver bullets.

Ten FOSS Development Fallacies For User Facing Software

This is a list, inspired by the Five Geek Social Fallacies, of common patterns or behaviours that developers of free/open source software (FOSS) fall into when they try to develop software for users who are not technical, or for whom non-technical users would be the most obvious userbase. Hopefully writing these down (which frankly is cathartic more than anything) is helpful to some in recognising these thought patterns and avoiding them when developing software - I’ve got some of my own thoughts on this at the bottom.

Designing for Developers: Key Takeaways from a Founder Dinner

Since moving back to San Francisco at the beginning of last year, I’ve been hosting regular founder dinners. Last night, I hosted a…

Perfect Software - Software for an Audience of One

We have many names to describe personal tools. Malleable software speaks to how it behaves. Home-cooked software speaks to who makes it.

Open Source Resistance

A direct-action manifesto for maintainers keeping open source alive on company time.

Why craft-lovers are losing their craft

Les Orchard made a quiet observation recently that I haven't been able to shake. Before LLM coding assistants arrived, the split between developers was…

Sustainable Open Source: The Maintainers Perspective or: How I Learned to Stop Caring and Love Open Source

Shirky: Situated Software

Clay Shirky's writings about the Internet, including Economics and Culture, Media and Community, Open Source

Patio Home

Global community of worker owned cooperatives specializing in the development of software, communication and design.