Software That Fits in Your Backpack

As with travel, when done enough, software uses drift towards the effective end of the spectrum plus speed. You get in, get it done, and you get out.

Sure you’ll continue to dabble with new software but like a chef with their knife collections, they use only a few trusty one when they actually cook.

The collection is not the craft. Same reason markdown swung into community love.

Time favors the useful tool.

Stream of thoughts.

The difference with software and real things is the physical weight, size, and mental effort to manage them.

Electron is pretty well optimized these days. Once something is not notably slow on the oldest cheapest hardware I own, I lose interest in making things any lighter or smaller.

I think the backpack is a good metaphor though, because I don't want to avoid Complexity, I want to avoid metaphorical "Weight".

Like, take Etcher. What it does could be done in just a few kilobytes, instead it's 80MB. But I have the 80MB to spare, and it loads fast. So I use it(Except on Pi when I use the far better Pi flasher that lets you do headless config right while burning the card).

Now, if Etcher was not available easier and I had to compile it myself and actually deal with all of the libraries, I wouldn't like it as much. It would "weigh" far too much. If it took time to load, or was unreliable, I wouldn't like it.

>Does your email client, text editor, or todo app need to essentially be another operating system unto itself? So much so that they very likely have complete support for Xbox-360 controllers for some reason? Could you achieve just as much, if not more functionality, by putting everything in a simple text file?

I love note-taking apps as much as the next guy ... but prefer a physical notebook more often than not (along with a good pen or mechanical pencil)