Home-Cooked Software: Building Personal Apps with Obsidian

Presented by Chazona Baum
Robin Sloan once built a messaging app just for his family: four users, zero churn, no plans to scale. He called it "home-cooked software"—programming liberated from the requirement to be professional, the way cooking at home is nothing like cooking in a commercial kitchen. Maggie Appleton later extended the idea to a whole category of "barefoot programmers" building local-first tools for themselves.

This talk is about bringing that same spirit to the tools you use every day. What if your reading list, your task board, your time tracker, or your job search lived as plain markdown files in an Obsidian vault—readable in any text editor, syncable with any file service, and wrapped in a simple desktop app that gives you a nicer interface than raw files?

We'll look at several real apps that do exactly this, from a consultant's time budget tracker to a personal job search pipeline, talk about what kinds of problems are good (and bad) fits for this approach, and then get hands-on. You'll leave with a starter project and a working (or at least started) personal app of your own.

What to bring: A laptop with Node.js installed and Obsidian (free) with any vault set up, even an empty one. No framework experience needed; we'll use vanilla JS.

All skill levels welcome! The 757Dev Community means a lot to me, and I thank each of you for your support. 🖖

As always, HUGE thanks to Assembly for hosting.
Learn more about the amenities and community of Assembly at https://www.assemblynfk.com/

Street parking is free after 6 pm. From 6:30-7:00 pm, we will have someone at the door to let you in. After 7, message the #javascript channel on 757Dev Slack. We meet in the Fur Room on the 4th floor.