It’s the easiest it’s ever been to make software–especially simple apps, single-serving websites, and scripts. This year I’ve been having a blast programming again and I’ve really embraced the idea:
Software is useful even if it has just one user.
This year I put together a few small apps for a single user: myself. They’re not scalable or secure or written to run on public servers or pushed to GitHub or tested beyond my own use case or ready in any way for other users or other programmers. They are all comically simple but help me get something done. They are home-cooked apps, and you’ll just have to believe me when I say they’re delicious.
In the spirit of showing my work—and to remember how and why I made them—here are a few of the things I built just for me in 2025.
- Tri Today: Told me whether and how far I needed run, bike, swim, lift, or rest today based on my personal triathlon training plan.
- Inbox Cleaner: Charts my daily progress toward an empty inbox against a goal end date, with a leaderboard of most-ignored senders.
- Cover Search: Finds high-resolution cover images for any given TV show, movie, album, book, or podcast.
- Curator: Generates a digest of interesting links, given everything I’ve written about on this website.
I’ve added these to my Projects page, in the hope that others can take the ideas and methods and adapt and expand on them for their own purposes.
Did you make anything small and simple just for you this year? Tell me about it.
You know those 4-box quadrant models consultants overcharge for? I made a little app to easily make one, and collect the ones I don’t want to forget. Which ones did I miss?
I made a new single-page app for fun. Cashkey is an easy way to visualize and share how money comes and where it goes. I made it because:
- Money is like water: it flows in and out of our lives. Many people don’t know how, though.
- Sankey diagrams are great for visualizing things that flow, but they’re not natively available in spreadsheets.
- Sankey-making apps like the awesome Sankeymatic still require math that’s easy to botch.
Cashkey doesn’t save any data on the server—there is no database involved. Try it and let me know what you think.
My favorite color is blue, but I can’t easily visualize or describe the differences between common shades of blue, like cornflower or cobalt or electric or navy. There are many different kinds of blue! So I built an interactive blue color palette to reference, that I can also quiz myself with to learn.
This was my first jaunt into coding a little tool with AI and it was both fun and frustrating. It didn’t take long to grab the wheel and get into “I’m just gonna finish this myself” mode. Worth the running start, and the world still needs programmers.
I’ve been preoccupied with how to make the most of what little time we get here in this life for as long as I can remember, and it’s only increased with age and brushes with illness. Over ten years ago, this Wait But Why piece by Tim Urban on visualizing the entirety of your life as a finite number of weeks (versus years or months) made a big impression on me.
A week is a short enough time to hold in your head, and long enough time for big things to happen. Then there are eras of your life that span collections of weeks.
At the end of 2024, I was inspired by a few year-end media roundups, like
Soderbergh’s extensive list and a friend who keeps a spreadsheet of every movie she’s ever watched. So I started writing very brief reviews of all the media I consume at
Media Menu. It’s been a rewarding—and sometimes difficult!—practice to write about what I like and what I don’t. I plan to keep this going.
Pay attention to the things that expand your heart. When a person, a work of art, an essay, a film, a song, a photograph intrigues you, makes your chest feel bigger, gives rise to a warm feeling in your body, take note.
I had these feelings earlier this fall, when I got to visit the Guggenheim for Jenny Holzer’s Light Line exhibit. I’ve loved Holzer’s truisms for years now. I barely felt my feet watching them scrolling across the edges of that gorgeous rotunda in person, the way they did in 1989, except at all 6 levels.
