Self-made software

Earlier this month I was listening to an episode of the BitFlip podcast, which talks about self-hosting. In that episode one of the two hosts was explaining how he had been looking for a good stand-alone self-hostable calendar server. Nothing he had found was as good as Nextcloud Calendar plugin (I agree there) but he didn’t want to run a full Nextcloud instance. Since, as he told his audience, he lacked any coding skills, what he did was ask an AI to isolate the calendar code from Nextcloud in such a way that it could be run without the rest of the platform. It worked, and it didn’t cost him a lot of time or effort. He was pleased with the result. He admitted to being apprehensive about its security, so he deployed it behind a firewall and used Tailscale to reach it when outside his network. The hosts reflected on the meaning of this story, comparing it to 3D-printing. When previously you’d need a craftsperson to build physical objects for you, 3D-printers allow you to do it yourself…