I like when apps are "finished"
It’s Blogvent, day 21, where I blog daily in December!
I saw a post on Mastodon recently:
We need to normalize declaring software as finished. Not everything needs continuous updates to function. In fact, a minority of software needs this. Most software works as it is written. The code does not run out of date. I want more projects that are actually just finished, without the need to be continuously mutated and complexified ad infinitum.
I really heartily agree with this. I have a handful of apps I’ve made personally that I genuinely just consider “done”, like:
The problem is, because they’re open source, people often look at the repository and see that the last code commit was, say, 3 (or 4 or 7 or 9) years ago, or that there’s some unanswered feature requests, and they’re like “ah, this software is unmaintained, it’s dead.” But they’re not! They just do their one job, well, and don’t need anything else!
I feel like a lot of people in tech claim the famous Leonardo da Vinci quote, “Art is never finished, only abandoned,” when it comes to software, but… sometimes the app just does the job it’s supposed to do. Most times, software is not art, layered with meaning, rather it’s just a utility that does a task.
I don’t really know what the solution is, here. More people finishing apps? Accepting that our work is not necessarily art? Less subscriptions? Wait, yeah, probably less subscriptions.
Anyway. Thought of the day. Try my apps. Bye.