says Robin Sloan, writing of the artisanal communication app he made to stay in touch with his family during the height of the pandemic:
My family all agreed we were going to need a replacement [for the defunct minimalist messaging app TapStack], and while my first instinct was to set up a group on Instagram or WhatsApp, the prospect of having our warm channel surrounded — encroached upon — by all that other garbage made me feel even sadder than the prospect of losing Tapstack.
So, instead of settling for a corporate messaging app …
I built one just for us.
He goes into a few technical details, mostly to demonstrate how few there are to be gone into, but one sticks with me from my very brief time working in part as a terrible iOS developer: “I distribute the app to my family using TestFlight, and in TestFlight it shall remain forever: a cozy, eternal beta.” The app isn’t on the App Store because it can’t be: Credentials are embedded in the codebase, and there’s no system for user authentication because the whole point of the app was to be distributed to a known group of users (via TestFlight). There’s nothing scalable, shareable, or generic about the app. It’s a tool for a hyper-local use case and there’s no reason, other than a spirit of technical civic-mindedness, to make it any less local.
This…
Look, take 56 seconds and just go watch Brennan Lee Mulligan recount getting his soul laid bare by Erika Ishii at the gaming table. It’s a cute story. You’ll like it.
That’s the effect this post had on me.
I’m maybe the opposite of Robin Sloan as a coder; I make stuff for my day job, I largely don’t do it for fun. That’s not because I don’t like it — I do it for work because I do like it and I can get paid for it, and I don’t do it for fun because I already do it for work and I have other interests (hello, readers!). And because my approach to coding has been exclusively professional, I have been very interested in doing the exact types of things that Sloan is deliberately not doing: How do I make this thing usable and maintainable by others, how do I streamline and circumscribe the user experience for maximum smoothness, how do I guarantee it’s working as designed, how do I manage credentials so I can share it securely? If I ran into the kind of code he’s describing at work, I would fulminate.
But it’s not work. It’s home cooking. It sees a need and fills it, in the time available, at the quality that’s possible.
I don’t write code for fun,
as I said. But I’ve spent a fair few years, now, trying to up the game on my writing. Getting professional cover art, setting up a submissions cadence for short fiction, sticking to a series, planning out production. This email list and, at this point, all my public online presences are in support of Matt Weber, Author.
And I guess this is where I should put the grand rejection of all that. But that’s not quite what I’m here for.
As usual, the idea is vexed and unclear. By and large, I like what my increasingly analytical and structured approach to writing has brought me, not so much because it has brought me increased productivity but because it has brought me a more detailed understanding of the costs of increasing productivity. And I like having books out in the world! I’d like to have the next one out sooner rather than later. I am willing to pay some level of cost for that! And I take pride in the quality of my work; I recently spent most of a month fixing typos in a couple published books after a stray (but accurate) blog comment gave me some shit for them. I don’t like derailing my production schedule, but also the print versions of my books are pretty expensive; I want them to be as good as I can make them.
But I’m basically off socials. I put something up on the blog when inspiration strikes and spare time appears — not often. And I write to you eleven times a year… but you know this is a pretty home-cooked affair as well. I am serious about the book-making, but not the other pieces of the Author Life.
I’m not yet ready to approach all of my creative endeavors as home cooking. But I think I maybe need to make a little more room for home cooking.
Some of this is the kind of stuff I already talk about: Doing more gaming, for example. But “home cooking” w/r/t art always evokes the physical, for me, maybe because I’m growing increasingly annoyed at how heavily the noveling process depends on the computer. So I cleared off our old piano and dusted off the guitar; I have a drawing class I’ve been meaning to sign up for. And my mind keeps turning to a lot of what Austin Kleon has been doing, the art he makes between the art he lives on: Mixtapes and, especially, zines. Little less production, little more R&D.
It’s not a natural mindset, or more accurately it’s an unlearned one. I was all about exploration and experimentation as an academic, but adjusting to corporate life required an intense focus on implementation, and raising kids only heightened that demand. I’ve been doing both for longer than I like to think. If you didn’t listen to the little Brennan Lee Mulligan YouTube short I linked above, go do it now; maybe the relevance is a little clearer.
This post was originally published in my June 2025 newsletter. If you liked it, you can subscribe here and get a free collection of poetry and short fiction!
Currently reading: THE STORY OF THE STONE, vol. 2, by Cao Xueqin, translated by David Hawkes.