Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrmg | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I go to an art or craft fair, I’m struck by the feeling that in a different world there would be a market for ‘artisanal software’ - with varying ratios of utility vs. aesthetics as the other arts and crafts have - and with independent software craftspeople selling interesting apps.

I think I would enjoy being a software craftsperson.

View on HN

Mark Bernstein has written a bit about this. He used to call it "neovictorian computing" but now uses the same "artisanal software" term, e.g.: https://www.markbernstein.org/NeoVictorian.html

"Artisanal software" is what we call our various piles of tech debt-ridden legacy code

It has knots and smells like patchouli

Yeah, that seems close to the kind of culture I was thinking of.

I commissioned a guy to make a small game for me last week, it can be just like working with any other artist/individual business

the unfortunate reality is that an hour of software labor doesn't go far, and software labor is super expensive

Yes, this is the key issue. It's too expensive to hire me or another experienced software engineer to do customization (except...). And doing anything significant takes me more than a few hours. There's just no market segment for me, an infrastructure engineer to help do something for even $1000.

But I do think there is a possibility of paying for a custom api or something that connects up pieces of other apps (an app build, phone or ui) - it's not that they are doing something less worthwhile, it's that I think integrating a few existing things in an existing way can with new ui elements, pics, style can yield something useful and pleasing with "just" a few hours of effort.

Back in the dawn of time, if you had a pc, you had a modem, and there were plenty of different terminal programs (that started up the modem for a call to a BBS usually), and implemented one or a variety of different terminals or bbs ui packages. I recall there were certain kind of enthusiast ones, where you could get a new feature added by paying the author $50. Maybe you wanted it to retry calls some number of times, or add somenew protocol to transfer something.

Technology currently lacks an aesthetic in my opinion. I think for a craft to exist the working of the material must have aesthetic.

I know that both hardware and software have aesthetics but I believe for the most part those aesthetics aren't used. I believe this is due to being in the early stage of digital system creation.

Double entry book keeping be expressed in hardware I think could be really beautiful which is what I hope Tohands from the earlier post develops into.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38599270

> Whenever I go to an art or craft fair, I’m struck by the feeling that in a different world there would be a market for ‘artisanal software’ - with varying ratios of utility vs. aesthetics as the other arts and crafts have - and with independent software craftspeople selling interesting apps.

I recently watched the 5 hour cut of Until the End of the World (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Until_the_End_of_the_World), which is an early 90s movie set "20 Minutes into the Future" (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TwentyMinutesInt...).

Some scenes depict some interesting software that might be kind of like what you're talking about, though it's probably just a case of a "Viewer Friendly Interface" (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ViewerFriendlyIn...). Still really entertaining, though.

You might be able to say this exists, to an extent, through hardware pairing (like the Teenage Engineering products or the Playdate they worked on). The woodblock prints from TFA are nothing without the specially-chosen paper they are imprinted onto as a way of being transported and displayed; perhaps software is the carefully-arranged ink.

That’s a good point, there is more hardware like this - though those are more like ‘mass-market’ or ‘commercial’ art than the kind of ‘art and craft fair’ stuff I was thinking of (think custom woodworking, limited-run prints, local photography, local watercolors - even things like pet portraits).

In the hardware world, I guess you could also make an argument that stuff like https://nixieshop.com, https://www.vestaboard.com, or https://www.traintrackr.io is nearing this.

I have seen real small-run ‘artisan’ made clocks at local art fairs, which I guess could be MCU based.

Maybe I should make some interesting clocks or displays and try getting a stall at the next craft fair nearby...

I think we maybe thinking along the same lines. I'm setting up a small run manufacturing facility with a few ideas that touch on technology.

I think the most important idea is that smaller circuits is not the end all and be all. There is a great opportunity in making larger circuits.

I plan to develop larger circuits that are embedded in laminates. The second step is would be a parametric set of appliances that can be ordered from a catalog to suit one's specific needs.

That's exactly what I thought FOSS would lead to (at least when I was naive and young). I thought the freedom that comes with FOSS would result in it tailor made software for people and businesses that are modified in just the right way to suit their usage. I knew it was a long shot but I had a lot of hope. "Webservices"/the internet changed the trajectory quite a bit. I'm not talking about the likes of businesses like Amazon, but rather apps like GMail, that very easily outpaced what you can do in a measly desktop computer - not to mention the issues of saving, syncing and backing up data that was never figured out/made easy on the desktop.

The closest I got to enjoy this was the various Greasemonkey scripts.

This made me to lookup Samorost again - initially a flash based adventure and puzzle game.

Linear.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com