An ode to houseplant programming (2025)

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An ode to houseplant programming 🪴

28 Apr 2025

Recurse Center (RC) peer Ryan recently coined a phrase that I instantly
fell in love with: houseplant programming.

In Ryan’s words:

[The tool I built] solves my idiosyncratic problems and may not address yours at all. That’s fine—take it as an ad to write tiny software just for yourself. Houseplant programming 🪴[2] !

[2] This isn’t an existing phrase as far as I know, but the closest I can think of is “barefoot developers” which a) is a little more granola than my vibe and b) is maybe tied up in some AI stuff. I guess this is
situated software but even smaller: I’m not building for dozens of users, I’m building for one user
in particular.

[source]

Houseplant programming: tiny software just for yourself. Perfection.

At the risk of overexplaining and thus cheapening the analogy, I feel the need to wax poetic.🪴

[Painting of person with long hair watering many plants in a sunny window.]

Blomsterfönstret
by Carl Larsson, 1895. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

When “It works on my machine” is the goal, not the excuse

Things I have found myself saying about some personal projects, almost apologetically:

• It works for me, but…

• It’s held together with string and electrical tape and visibly disorganized wires…

• I have to do manual restarts after the power goes off…

In the world of houseplant programming none of these statements are apology-worthy.1 In a workplace, about a project that is intended for
productionization2 and mass dissemination? Sure, production-ready code—code that has a job, or provides the infrastructure for a job—needs to be some
flavor of robust and tested and reliable. For a project that lives in my house and does what I need it to and periodically needs a little extra help? No worries.

Aditya Athalye (another RC peer!) perfectly captures this vibe in the project description for his software project
shite:

shite’s job is to help me make my website: https://evalapply.org. Thus, shite’s scope, (mis)feature set, polish will always be
production-grade, where production is “works on my machine(s)” :) [source]

Strong “Everything I do is the attitude of an award winner because I have won an award” energy:

[Screenshot from Parks and Recreation, with text of the quote from just above this image]

Any code is production ready, if you redefine the scope of your production environment!

Properties of houseplants, programmatic and chlorophyllous

Before we get to the self-reflective bit,3 here is a non-exhaustive list of parallels between my houseplants and my houseplant programs:

• A happy home: I love having both plants and homemade projects in my living space. Sharing a space with them reminds me of things that I like about the world and about myself.

[Photo of a shelf full of plants.]

Exhibit A: Happy houseplants on a happy houseplant shelf.

[Photo of a flipdisc display with the number 73 and a sun symbol displayed.]

Exhibit B: Happy flipdisc installation on a happy flipdisc shelf.

[Screenshot of computer menu with one line per emoji: duck, book, microscope, trophy.]

Exhibit C: Happy xbar-based utilities for launching common tasks and starting music playback, on a happy menu bar on my laptop.

Longevity: Like my plants, I love my little projects and I want them to thrive, and I baby them a little bit to get them started. But also, if they don’t work out? It isn’t a big deal, into
the great compost bin in the sky Github they go, where a hard-won line or two may be composted recycled into a future project.

[Photo of ceramic cat planter containing spider plant.]

This cat once had a cactus tail. Now it has a spiderplant tail.

Propagation: Clippings! I love to propagate my plants and share them with friends. Do you want a pilea or a spider plant or a nice philodendron? Let me know, I’ll hook you up! Similarly, do you want to set up
your own pen plotter or make some quick and easy screenshot memes? Awesome, I try to document and share the code and steps for recreating most of my projects.

That said, once a plant/code has taken up residence in your home, it is no longer my responsibility. While I’d love to hear about what you did to help it thrive, and if it starts looking sad I’ll gladly help you think through
what might help, if it never thrives I’m probably not going to lose sleep over it.

Besides, once you’ve gotten as far as propagating the code/plant I’ve given you, you’ll know about as much about the situation as I do—maybe more—and now we can explore the next steps together.

Pet toxicity: Just like some plants, some projects are practically poisonous to my cat and—if the cat had her way—should be rehomed with a pet-free pal.

Universalization: I don’t care to engineer my houseplants to thrive in every environment—and similarly, I don’t feel a need to make my houseplant code fully generalizable, until there is a more specific reason
to do so.

Knowledge sharing: I love reading about other people’s houseplant projects. While I occasionally take code cuttings for my own home, mostly I just want to wander around and admire their houseplants and learn
more about the woes they encountered when figuring out how to help their code/plants thrive.

I do not need to propagate someone’s houseplant [code] in my own home in order to admire it; I can learn to consider a different fertilizer or communication protocol without transplanting their program into my own home.

Capitalism: One person’s houseplants are another person’s plant nursery. One person’s houseplant code is another person’s B2B SaaS product. Enough said.

Bugs: Soil gnats. Where do they even come from?! It is unknowable.

Sometimes my weather station shows me the icon for snow, even though it is currently April and the temperature isn’t predicted to dip below 32. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Fun: It is really, really fun to grow plants.5 It is really really fun to write code.6

Not an idea, not yet a Platonic ideal

While I build software as a career, I also like to muck about with code in service of other goals. When sharing those other projects it has taken me a long time be able to talk about what my code does do without adding a zillion
caveats about what the code does not do.7

Why? I think somewhere along the line I picked up the unhealthy—and false!—assumption that it wasn’t worth sharing my code until it was ready to be reused easily by whoever was able to access it—specifically, not sharing that code
until it was “production ready,” for some arbitrary and ever-growing definition of “production” that I never quite fully defined for myself.8

In the last year or so when presenting personal projects I’ve taken to saying that they’re prototypes. Prototyping is a thing that makes sense to many folks in the field—it involves a first pass at trying to build something, with
output that won’t be optimized, might be hacked together with glue and dreams, and possibly even “only works on my machine”. But it’s proof that it is worth spending more time on something, or not worth spending
more time on something.9

[...]

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