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Comment by vijucat | Hacker News Reader

Artisan is not a bad metaphor. Take furniture. There's a place for IKEA, and there's a place for expensive, hand-crafted Scandinavian furniture.

https://www.scandinaviastandard.com/this-is-why-that-sofa-is...

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I'm not sure building furnace is a good metaphor for crafting good software.

The nature of software is that every piece of it can be mass produced (copied and distributed) once the first piece is finished. All the 'artisan' effort goes into making that first copy.

That's a pretty narrow view of software too. The nature of building software systems is not always towards being able to mass-produce them. What would be the point of copying and distributing 10K copies of my script that runs migrations for one legacy database in a very specific way?

I have written a lot of software for myself or some close associates that is really only for our purposes (or sometimes just for our amusement). Certainly I could trivially distribute the software to whomever I wished, but it wouldn't be useful, appreciate it, or perhaps even run outside of the environment I wrote it for.

For instance I have some lovingly crafted bash scripts, that feel somewhat artisan. They keep my home server humming along, applying updates, making regular backups, and reporting status. The scrips are very tailored to my use and would not easily integrate elsewhere.

I could have used off the shelf software for much of this (ala "IKEA"), I'm sure, but I am a tinkerer, hobbyist, and, if I flatter myself, an artisan.

> there's a place for expensive, hand-crafted Scandinavian furniture.

And then there’s Italian craftsmanship https://artemest.com/

So we'll have expensive artisanal software for rich people? Self-assembly takes a whole new meaning for the rest of us.

Laravel has been using it for, what, a decade now?

https://laravel.com

you get it! I think the exactly same way.

where in the analogy does social software fit?

Are you referring to that article about software that serves a small local community?

I can't remember the name of the author but there was an interesting article about this, I think from some college or university in New York, talking about some examples of software that was set up at specific locations on the campus for specific purposes, and explaining how they wouldn't have worked as an online global thing.

Edit: Here it is!

https://web.archive.org/web/20040411012949/http://www.shirky...

Purdue Pharma.

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