#!/bin/sh Invaders is probably the world’s most arcade-accurate terminal-playable Space Invaders clone. It’s fun to play! It’s rather quixotically written in pure POSIX shell, probably the worst ‘real’ language to use for this.

The answer, to me, is you pay for an app if the care and attention the developer gives the app is more than you can afford to give. If the few bucks you’ll spend is worth more than the time you’d spend building your own version of the app.

This, 100%. I vibe-coded an RSS reader/markdown editor I use as a backend to this blog.

A couple weeks later, I decided I wanted my own Bluesky client too. I may have been a little drunk when I came to that decision. I woke up the next day a little hungover, and a lot bummed out that I put such a hurtin’ on my ChatGPT usage, especially since there were more bugs and glitches than I was comfortable fixing. Let alone maintaining something like that long-term…

So I deleted the GitHub repo and moved on. I could have, technically, kept working on it and gotten it running as smooth as my RSS app, but it wouldn’t have been worth it to me.

There are plenty of Bluesky apps that work great — many of them vibe-coded, and many that are worth the couple of bucks the devs are asking. Shoutout to Anisota, for that matter.

I’ve been using RSS readers for close to 20 years. It’s the only way I consume any writing these days. If there is no RSS feed for a website, it might as well not exist. If there is, and the topic is interesting to me, there is a high chance I have it in my list. There are, after all, around 1300 websites I subscribe to.

Same! Only a little less than 20 years, and I thought my ~300 feeds were overkill.

Originally, I wanted to build a theme for FreshRSS, but realized that what I wanted to achieve was not really doable. It was like putting lipstick on a pig. You could change some colors, but not the layout. So instead, I built a frontend that uses FreshRSS as the backend. It’s called Paper.

I did something really similar. Only instead of FreshRSS and Kirby, I’m using Miniflux and Hugo, with the source on GitHub and deployment handled by Vercel. I call mine Radar.

It’s the whole backend to this blog!

I post a lot of links, so I set everything up so I can just grab any story out of my RSS feed, use the default headline or write my own, and then add commentary and tags.

I added in a really simple markdown editor and it’s perfect for me.

We are in the age of endlessly personalized apps that anyone with a little understanding of programming can create.