It's basically like the Google suite of apps or Next Cloud, I have the main app where you can manage your account, backups, etc, and it links to a bunch of other apps, each one living in a subdomain. The apps that already exists are:
- Password manager
- Finances
- Contacts
- Account (Backup, Restore, private keys, etc)
- Authenticator (OTP, TOTP)
- Email
- Photos
- Movies (2 parts, one is an IMDB like manager and the other is a Netflix homepage look alike for viewing content)
- Flashcards
- Link tracker
And I have the following apps in the development pipeline:
It started just as an MySQL database that I used to track my expenses and budget, later I started also storing passwords in it, quickly I realized that I needed a user interface, then I slapped a bootstrap theme on it (this was back when Angular 1 was all the rage), then it went through many iterations as across the years and the current one started back in 2020, it uses VueJS 3 and used to use ant design, but I had to create my own UI library to accommodate the sheer complexity of the custom UI needed. It runs on a raspberry pi with docker.
> Would you be willing to describe how it works / record a video of how you use it?
I'll definitely do it in the near future and post it here on HN.
> My exclusive, differential, unique characteristic against the world, my joker card.
In the sense that, if one day money becomes short, I could extract a few SAAS out of it and make some money or even sell it.
> I guess the idea is that you integrated all the apps with each other, such that you can create an event from a text message, forward an email to a Signal contact, this kind of things?
Yes, the main app has standalone apps, where each app integrates with each other whenever possible, like listing contacts in the email app, and one of the apps is "Flow", where you can create IFTTTs between apps.
> Have you written more about your personal project anywhere?
No, I've had plans to create a blog to write about it or make a YouTube video, but haven't come to it yet.
> One thing I only realised once I started building my own tools, is that you become - from day one - an unmatched world-class expert in using that tool
This is something that I've also realized - a lot of times when we interact with software we kinda just fly by its UI to accomplish a goal, not paying much attention to its secondary features, options, quirks, etc - But when you write your own software, you have a map of everything in your head, and you don't have to guess what exactly a button does, how it does it or where you need to go to do that.
This is poetry. I have been working on a personal project for the last 10 years that replaces every other app I used to use - E-mail, calendar, and all the others we all use on a daily basis - and every time someone sees me using it they ask "Wow, this is amazing, how do I download it!?", and the answer is always the same: you don't.
There's a beauty to engineering something having yourself as the target user, and no one else. I'm 100% convinced this project single-handedly keep my mental wellbeing in check, and it provides me with a constant source of hopefulness and happiness to the future - that no company/salary could ever offer me. My exclusive, differential, unique characteristic against the world, my joker card.
As an old web developer myself, that surfed pretty much all the waves (No JS, just a Perl or PHP monolith, then JS with XMLHTTPRequest, jQuery, Backbone, Ember, WebPack, Angular 1 and finally React) this argument doesn't make sense. No, there isn't a new JS framework every minute. No, you don't need to learn a new thing everyday. There's really only 4 framerworks (React, Vue, Angular & Svelte, in this order), they pretty much do the same thing (Replace explicitness with declarativiness) and the only thing that changes is how you use them (Which you can learn in less than a week if you're a experienced developer).
The way we do stuff today is just a better and improved way to do the same thing we used to do yesterday, the fact that we have so much tooling is just a reflection of the fact that the web was created to serve documents and now we need to serve apps, so we need transformers along the way that allow for that 100% change of scope. But we aren't changing the base (HTML/CSS/JS, which we should), just the wrappers on top of it.
Not really, in the sense that the idea of a lot of these apps are "customization and plugins", and I wanted something that had it all, required 0 config and was totally opinionated. I can set up a new environment just by doing docker-compose up, that simplicity was always my goal 0.
Yes, it took time to develop it, but I would be working on another shiny thing anyway as I like to work on side projects, so I see that as a net gain.
I've being developing my own micro-cloud for the last ten years - There I've wrote my own email client, password manager, finance book, OTP, movies, music, notes, calendar, backup... and a lot of other micro apps. It works fantastic for me, and I'd recommend you to try setting up an instance of NextCloud, which can achieve similar results. My problem with org-mode, Obsidian, etc is that they are attention black holes, you focus all of your time installing plugins and configuring your workspace that by the time you're done with that you don't really feel like doing the real work. If that's your case, you might consider removing apps that hinder you ability to control your life and just use a simple, plain, gigantic markdown file and grow organically from there, with the focus being simplicity and 0 config.