Non-industrial software
In today's world "software" has become synonymous with "software product". But this is a misleading conflation, sort of like equating suits and cocktail dresses with all of fashion or thinking pop music is all modern music. Software that has to be a commercial product is subject to a lot of really gnarly constraints:
- It has to be built by teams of people with different ideas and goals and skill levels
- It has to scale to thousands or millions of users to make money
- It has to build in mechanisms for billing and payments, analytics, and "growth"
- It has to be easily learnable by new users
These constraints make the modern concept of "software product" a kind of monster of industrial baggage, and while it leads to impressive feats like Google's engineering infrastructure, other worlds are possible.
I think the ideal technology (technology writ large, even beyond computers and electronics) feels like the stuff in your kitchen. They are familiar and become part of your life, adding to the way you experience your every day. They can be simple or they can be sharp expensive pro tools. They move around and mold to how you like to hold them and use them. They are there when you need it, reliably. They help sustain you and last for a long time. There are professional kitchenware but most people don't need the industrial-grade stuff.
Most of modern software is industrially produced for mass-market use, so people get used to lazily thinking that is all that is possible. If you can write software, you can build your own kitchen where you can cook your own food. You can host your friends and feed them too. Maybe it will inspire your friends to cook for themselves and invest in their own metaphorical kitchens, too. Hopefully it can be something that grows with you and becomes a part of your every day.
I guess what I'm saying is: don't succumb to the industrial, mass-market aesthetic of what scaled up software looks like, and don't take for granted what other people tell you computers are for and how they should feel to use. Learn to really deeply understand what computers can do for you and build out of them something that you can say feels like a reflection of you.
Build things that you are proud of, not just because it is valuable, but because you are proud to sign your name on it and invite it into your home.