Showing items from philosophy

The Manual Process Is The Point

• Marc Lewis
• Date : May 3, 2026
• Categories : projects
• Tags : caffeinated softworks ,philosophy ,projects

Earlier this week on a Reddit thread I was discussing Caffeinated Checkbook. Someone pointed out that “every banking app does this, so why does anyone need it?” It’s a fair question. Every bank has an app, and there are many similar apps such as Credit Karma, YNAB, Quicken Simplifi, and many others. They all show you your transactions, pull in your data, and categorize your spending automatically. So why would anyone bother typing transactions in manually?

Because entering the transactions manually is the whole point.

The Industry Decided to Harvest Users. I Decided to Build for Myself.

• Marc Lewis
• Date : April 24, 2026
• Categories : projects
• Tags : caffeinated softworks ,philosophy ,projects

I started writing code in 1981 on a Commodore VIC-20. I was 11 years old.

Not because I had a plan, not because I saw a career path, I was only 11 after all, but because computers were the most interesting thing I’d ever encountered. I couldn’t stop thinking about them and the endless possibilities that they represented. By the time I was 14 I was writing BBS software and had landed my first paid programming job through the early online community. This was before the internet as most people know it existed. Before the web. Before email was something normal people had. Just modems, phone lines, and a community of people who thought computers were worth staying up until 3am for.

Software Design Principals - For Users

• Marc Lewis
• Date : April 15, 2015
• Categories :
• Tags : code ,ego ,software ,philosophy

I’ve been chewing on this since the latest Android update hit Jessica and my phones, and I posted about it here. Basically, software design has gotten crazy over the last few years. With technology going mainstream, and most people carrying computers in their pockets in the form of a smartphone, software design is much less of an art form than a race. The problem as I see it, though, is they don’t know what they’re racing towards, other than to be first. There is nothing wrong with that, either. Though sometimes I wish developers could be just a bit more altruistic when they make their choices.