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Comment by Donckele | Hacker News Reader

Is there a better word than “shitty” - slightly more positive, more positive, something not totally crap, more fun and whole lot of learning.

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The thing is, I really really like the word "shitty" here.

Because, let's face it, most software out there (especially most software built by individual hobbyists) is ... let's say not great.

I realize that this is a cultural thing. In the US for example they tend to favor soft language more. They would call it "beta", "early access" or "personal project".

As an European I tend to see it more as... well, "shitty".

And that is fine. It is in fact refreshing not to have to filter out the marketing buzzwords like "innovative" or "minimalistic". The title immediately put me in a good disposition towards the author. It feels honest.

As a European [1], I have no idea what you refer when you say "especially most software built by individual hobbyists is [...] not great". Have you seen the websites built professionally by consulting agencies? Public administrations? Sure a hobbyist just starting out doesn't write great code, but hobbyists care a lot more about quality and will improve a lot faster than those just slinging sausages or those making the bucks.

When I peek into your average open source project (made, mostly, by hobbyists) I see good to great quality. Whenever any private code gets leaked, or on your average company, or just inspecting websites, you see the horrors. Just my experience here :)

[1] Spaniard, I do believe our websites might be on the bottom of quality of Europe though, so my experience might be different from other "European"s :)

When I said _individual_ I meant "projects developed by one person only".

In general I agree with you, open source tends to have better quality than proprietary software.

I will point out however that Open Source sees a lot of contribution from non-hobbyists too. That's my case, in fact: my salary for the last 10 years came from working on open source projects.

I have a "shitty" static site generator. It's "shitty" because almost no thought or design went into it. It started as 20-30 lines of code and grew into ~1000. It's got hacks, bad decisions, it redoes work like reading files more than ones or reading the files it already wrote.

But, it works, it has rare features I need, features that AFAIK most of the famous ones do not and could not be easily added (well, at least when I checked)

That said, while it started 100% hand written I did add stuff over the years. For example I had my own templating system but switched to 'handlebars' at some point. I don't actually remember if there was a good reason or not. A long time ago I wanted to add RSS/Atom support. Sure that should be easy to do on my own (i've done it in the past) but whatever library I looked into was easy without too many dependencies. The latest, I added jsdom to process a few more automated transformations.

The word "shitty" really does describe the code and I'm embarrassed to show it really but it works and I have better things to do than refactor to make it clean.

"bespoke" is probably the one you'd want to use.

"Bespoke" implies made to order for someone else.

I would just use "personal".

"Shitty software" was an old saying even back in 1995:

http://scripting.com/davenet/1995/09/03/wemakeshittysoftware...

"We Make Shitty Software... With Bugs!"

Ha Ha!

Hacky

"minimal"?

Purpose-driven? Custom? Personal(ized)? Custom-made?

"mvp"

positively shitty.

err...

Craft?

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