I've been hearing the term "personal software" used recently and it resonates a lot with me. There's plenty of doom and gloom surrounding AI, but I see a positive effect: we have the ability to improve many aspects of our lives, at whatever pace we can accommodate.

Why make software just for myself?

  1. 1.

    I've always embraced the term Personal Development Environment: PDE, as opposed to IDE. Who is better placed to know what tools suit me: me or some random developers in Redmond creating VS Code for the widest audience possible? I use tools that fit my knowledge, which is more advanced in some areas than others, just like anyone else.

  2. 2.

    Any friction in an app or website almost immediately makes me use it less. I've stopped using certain browsers, note-taking apps, todo-list apps, calendar apps, etc., all because I disliked some aspect of them.

  3. 3.

    I'm good at recognizing tech debt: what could be improved if only time/money permitted, what processes take too long, and what things we should do but avoid for whatever reason.

Life Tech Debt

Let's apply all this to life: Life Tech Debt. There are tons of things I avoid that I might be able to get ahead of if they were surfaced to me differently, so let's build that. What else do I do that takes up too much of my time relative to its value? Let's fix that too. Previously, it wouldn't have been worth the time investment to manually create a personal dashboard that replaces a dozen or so apps, but that value proposition has changed so I started building it.

First up is a CRUD/email app that is proving to be a big time-saver to my workout tracking process, built with the assistance of just a handful of prompts. Next post: how it works.