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The Manual Process Is The Point

Earlier this week on a Reddit thread I was discussing Caffeinated Checkbook. Someone pointed out that “every banking app does this, so why does anyone need it?” It’s a fair question. Every bank has an app, and there are many similar apps such as Credit Karma, YNAB, Quicken Simplifi, and many others. They all show you your transactions, pull in your data, and categorize your spending automatically. So why would anyone bother typing transactions in manually?

Because entering the transactions manually is the whole point.

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The Industry Decided to Harvest Users. I Decided to Build for Myself.

I started writing code in 1981 on a Commodore VIC-20. I was 11 years old.

Not because I had a plan, not because I saw a career path, I was only 11 after all, but because computers were the most interesting thing I’d ever encountered. I couldn’t stop thinking about them and the endless possibilities that they represented. By the time I was 14 I was writing BBS software and had landed my first paid programming job through the early online community. This was before the internet as most people know it existed. Before the web. Before email was something normal people had. Just modems, phone lines, and a community of people who thought computers were worth staying up until 3am for.

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Caffeinated Notes: A Digital Steno Pad

Since I started writing code in the early 80s I’ve always had a notebook with me. In high school and college it was a spiral notebook. I’d sit in the cafeteria between classes with a cup of coffee and literally write code by hand to transcribe and edit when I got home. At the office it was a steno pad. Once I wasn’t in school, it was just the steno pad. I used to buy them in bulk at Costco.

The steno pad stuck around for decades. Smaller than a spiral notebook, the top spiral meant flipping pages didn’t cover my keyboard or mouse. No organization system, no hierarchy, no folders. Just notes, most recent at the bottom, flip through to find what you need. It worked. I still have a desk drawer with half a dozen steno pads in it.

That’s what I wanted to build.

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Caffeinated Calendar: A Calendar App Born Out of Frustration

I’ve been self-hosting my own calendar infrastructure for a while now. CalDAV, Radicale, the whole stack. It works. But the one thing I could never get right was the client. Every calendar app I tried either wanted me to route everything through their servers, locked me into a single ecosystem, or just didn’t handle shared calendars well.

So I built one.

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