“An app can be a home-cooked meal”, Robin Sloan wrote in 2020 when he presented a delightfully silly app he’d built for family and friends.
The metaphor of a home-cooked meal, something you do purely for the love of the craft and for the love of sharing something with the people around you, is a powerful way to counter a day and age where we’re constantly urged to work harder, “hustle” more, and monetize our passion in order to be successful. Look, there’s nothing wrong with working hard if that’s what gets you out of bed in the morning, but for fun’s sake: learn to live a little and focus on the things that matter.
Late last year I had some generous time off and used it to revive an old pet project - a browser game version of a traditional German card game I love to play (you can check it out on doppelkopf.club if you’re curious). Building this web app has been one of the most fun projects I’ve ever done and I’m tremendously proud that I managed to get it published.
I didn’t build this to start a side-hustle or generate extra income (I’ve got a decent job that does the trick just fine). I built it for the love of the craft, because I enjoy creating something out of nothing and see things come to life that people can use. I built it because I love this particular card game and want to make it simple for others to learn it, too, so they can spend countless hours having fun with their friends. I built this because people in my life often brought up how folks around them played Doppelkopf all the time and they regret that they never got a chance to learn it. Thinking about it, doppelkopf.club really isn’t unlike a home-cooked meal, something created to share with the folks around you.
I live in a small town. People know each other. Going to the bakery or doing groceries means you’ll likely bump into friends, neighbors, family, people you know. Going to the pub means seeing the same old faces.
In my neck of the woods, building software is a fairly unusual thing to do. Playing Doppelkopf, this odd card game I like playing, is far from unusual, though. Pick a random person on the street and ask if they play it and chances are good that they’ll say “yeah, sure” (well, they’d answer in German, of course) or “I don’t, but I always wanted to pick it up”. A website that teaches people to learn and play Doppelkopf is something that deeply resonates with folks around here. And over the last few weeks I learned just how much it resonates:
Early January, a local newspaper wrote a story on doppelkopf.club, the project I’ve built. They published an article online and put out almost a full page in their print edition on a Monday morning.
What happened over the two weeks following that newspaper article was simply heart warming.
- My dad called me first thing in the morning, all excited to talk about that huge newspaper article he’d just read
- Friends who grew up here sent me messages saying that they spotted my face in their news feeds or that their parents had sent them pictures of that newspaper article
- My 97-year-old grandmother called me to tell me how much she enjoyed seeing her grandson in the newspaper
- Regulars and staff at the pub told me how they’d read the article
- Someone from a village nearby reached out, reminiscing the good old days when he used to play Doppelkopf with his friends who’ve long passed away or can no longer play
- Strangers who happened to read the newspaper article sent me dozens of emails saying how much they enjoyed the project, sharing stories of how they learned to play the game themselves, or giving me great feedback and bug reports
I’m tracking a few statistics to understand how many people are playing, how many games are being played, what kind of games people are playing and where they might run into errors. While there’s a lot of vanity in those numbers, there’s also some very reassuring message: The number of games played daily shot up once the newspaper article had been published and continue to hover 20x above what I saw before. People are playing, people are learning, and according to all those lovely emails and messages I’m seeing, people enjoy it. People close by, people I run into day-to-day.
This is what home-cooked software feels like. You do something because you enjoy doing it, you share it with others so they can enjoy it, too. That’s it. No pressure to make money, no pressure to grow, just love for the craft, just making people’s days a little brighter.