Blake Watson – Manu

Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? Sure! I’m Blake. I live in a small city near Jackson, Mississippi, USA. I work for MRI …

I enjoy reading Manuel's People & Blogs series when I want something low-key and interesting. From Blake's recent interview for the series^[1], I found the phrase "home-cooked apps"^[2] (h/t to Robin Sloan for coining it), which speaks to me.

Home-cooked apps aren’t optimized for shareholders. There are no sales funnels. No user stories. No scrums. And they don’t scale. They don’t have to. They aren’t designed for thousands or millions of users. These are the kinds of apps that you make for a handful of people. Or maybe just for you.

In my personal life, I don't do a lot of programming. To be honest, I get enough of it during my workday. But I still like the idea of solving a problem I have, one totally unique to me, with a home-cooked app. It doesn't have to scale, it doesn't need VC funding, and it doesn't have to be used by anyone else.

Most of my day is spent figuring out how to handle an ever-increasing flow of data. Since I work at a startup, our business has to scale for us to reach our revenue goals and become profitable. It's a neat job, but exhausting—home-cooked apps are a chance to think differently about our relationship to technology, and that feels worth doing.