Today I released a dump of six months of flashcards I autogenerated from my tiny Finnish news archive to make the lives of my fellow language learners easier. The actual code which generates this archive is about 300 lines of Python . The basic value add for the user:
- What you want: Better fluency in Finnish.
- What you need: Practice. Lots of it.
- What this gives you: GOTO 2.
This is emphatically not the kind of product, or use case, I would stumble upon as a brain-in-the-vat developer. It is a niche offering, one I only found because I actually got out into the world and tried to do something hard. In so doing, I recognized the possibility of building a tool that could help me in this non-programming endeavour. So I built it. And I’m proud of it.
I didn’t fuss with frameworks, I didn’t muck up the code by trying to shoehorn in concurrency or HTTP endpoints or wherever where it wasn’t truly needed. I just did what was required to assist me out in the real world, and it turns out other people have found it valuable as well.
That’s lovely. That is the heart of valuable software to me. Valuable software lets people do new things. However defined, and simple as.
Hyvää Juhannusta to all of my fellow hackers out there, making the world a better place. If you’re in Finland, hit me up! I’m on vacation in July, like most of us.