January 16, 2026
Allen keys at dawn
IKEA for Software
Build apps like bookshelves? Devs brawl over flat‑pack dreams
TLDR: A founder wants an “IKEA for software” after spending a year building common app basics, and the crowd split fast: nostalgics cite HyperCard, veterans say we’ve had this for years, and critics fear calcified, locked‑in platforms. Everyone agrees: less grunt work, more real progress would be huge.
A founder confessed it took a year to build a solar mini‑grid control system and wished for an “IKEA for software”—ready‑made apps you just tweak. The comments erupted like a Saturday at IKEA: carts crashing, allen keys flying, opinions everywhere. Nostalgia squad yelled “Make software like HyperCard!” while pragmatists loved the furniture metaphor—stop hand‑carving the same legs, just assemble and move on. Then history buffs stormed in: we’ve had modular tools for decades (Odoo, Eclipse, Power Apps, you name it), so why are we still reinventing the bookshelf? Enterprise veterans pointed to SAP, Salesforce, and ServiceNow as the closest thing to templates—great until they “calcify” into systems nobody loves. Cloud fans waved the Cloudflare flag, claiming the big clouds already sell high‑level building blocks. The big split? Team Flat‑Pack vs Team Bespoke: one side dreams of plug‑and‑play platforms, the other warns about walled gardens and one‑size‑fits‑nobody kits. Jokes flew about missing screws, Swedish meatballs, and “some assembly required,” but the stakes are real: most apps share boring basics, from logins to dashboards to device control (think Internet of Things meters). The crowd wants less sawdust, more shipping—and a template that doesn’t trap you.
Key Points
- •The platform manages solar mini-grids with admin and mobile-first web apps for monitoring and control.
- •Its architecture uses Postgres, Timescale, and S3 for storage; Vue for the view layer; and NestJS for business logic.
- •Reaching production took about a year, with significant effort on RLS, social login, Grafana embedding, timeseries setup, and double-entry ledger.
- •Closed-source systems, low-code platforms, and database wrappers were evaluated but found lacking for ownership, customization, or full-stack needs.
- •The author advocates a top-to-bottom, template-based approach and notes barriers like system differences and build-from-scratch tendencies.