Software engineer in Melbourne, Australia. I build apps on off hours, from ideation to deployment.

Most of what I build for myself started the same way. Something I used every day was worse than it needed to be, nobody was going to fix it, and the fix was small enough that one person could do it. So I did it, and then kept going until the thing was genuinely usable rather than merely demonstrable. None of it was planned as a body of work.

What they have in common is a conviction about ownership. The things you already own should stay yours: your files, your library, what you read, what your own week looks like. A lot of software treats those as something to hold on your behalf, behind an account you have to keep alive and a subscription that renews whether you opened the app or not. I did not want to build more of that.

A promise not to misuse what you own is worth very little by itself, because whoever made it can change their mind or need the money. So where I can, I try to make the promise structural instead: not a line in a policy, but something the software has no ability to do in the first place. That is harder to build, and it is the only version of the promise I would believe coming from someone else. What I am after in the end is software that is finished, in the old sense. It does the thing, it asks nothing monthly, and it does not need me to stay interested for it to keep working.