I can no longer count the number of apps that I have built. I should probably re-look and retire some of them. Because it doesn’t monetarily cost much to keep them around, I’m not really that bothered. Where it does take some toll is on attention and creative energy.
Once in a while I read through the list of apps I make and come up with new ideas to improve them. I do actually spend some time here and there pushing some of the apps forward, but for others, especially the seasonally related ones, they don’t get the same attention.
I didn’t really stop coding during my actual vacation. While we were traveling, a lot of ideas popped up and I continued building my little apps.
I took an extra week before getting back to full on work, purposely, to at least get a chance to do the things I had wanted to do on break: make time for hobbies, touching grass, other extra curricular activities. But the first few days of supposedly doing everything and nothing quickly turned into a coding frenzy. I saw myself descending into full time vibe coding, neglecting all the other things that I had wanted to do in the summer.
Instead of fighting it, I tried to steer it to things that would motivate me to do the things I actually wanted to do.
So I built more apps, this time, Android apps, because I wanted to have a development pipeline for mobile apps that were (surprise, surprise) event sourced.
health bit
I wanted to get better at the number of steps I took and keeping track of how much I eat and sleep. I already have really good tracking apps. My problem was remembering to log them, or remembering to charge my watch and put it on.
Ok, with the steps it’s remembering to actually take the steps.
So I built an app that connects to Health Connect, the aggregator on Android, and based on your activity you see your digital pet grow, change moods, possibly die. Don’t worry, you can just as easily hatch a new one. The point was that neglecting yourself puts some other creature, one that depends on your wellbeing, at risk.
It was fun in the beginning, creating the sprites, trying to figure out how to make it easier for my kids to possibly customize their pets. Funny how I thought of getting my kids to design a thing that gets sick if I stop taking care of myself (totally unintentional by the way).
It grew in complexity when I wanted to scale on the moods and interactions. There were just too many creative possibilities that I didn’t have enough creative juices for. I would like to have spent more time on the character design and customisations, but that took too much time. Right now it’s in its most basic form.
The other hurdle is that because it collects health data, the app would have to go through approvals and a lot more scrutiny if I actually wanted to take it to the store. Instead I have a sideload page so I can easily install and test it without going through the whole process when it’s not a fully developed app yet.
The app is called health bit, but it should probably be called tamaYOUchi. I remember someone mentioning how all these health apps bring us back to tamagotchi days, except the tamagotchi is us.
Viceversa
It was easier in the mornings to just be immersed in coding because the kids were all asleep till way past noon, so there was really nothing that “needed” to be done. At night time, we watched movies and indulged a bit too much on the candy and snacks. What used to be reserved for Saturday, and the occasional ‘little saturday’ that is the wednesday, had now become an everyday affair. “It’s still vacation!” we would tell ourselves, and inside I would feel guilty about all the laundry that needs to be folded and the little mess mountains slowly piling up around us.
The other thing about this summer was an increased focus on the want to dos instead of the need to dos. The laundry mountain is expanding its territory, the tolerance on messiness has increased, relaxation is at its max.
I know sometimes you have to let go, but I couldn’t help but feel guilty and didn’t want to let it go completely.
To lessen that guilt, I wanted to have some form of evidence that I at least did these ‘must do’ things today. You deserve to relax a bit!
The idea of going on a cleaning spree just overwhelmed me, so to make things easier I thought about breaking overwhelming tasks into micro tasks instead. Instead of tackling the already millions of clothes (and SOCKS! Who is wearing socks in the summer??) that needed to be folded, I’d set a very low bar for myself. “Fold some clothes”, which I later turned into “fold clothes for 5 minutes” because I caught myself cheating a bit there for the points. “Vacuum somewhere”. “Tidy kitchen”.
So I built Viceversa, where I could track micro tasks in exchange for allowing myself a vice of my choice.
It started as a 1:1 model, five minutes of a chore equals five minutes of a small indulgence. Tasks small enough to not be overwhelming. Eventually I wanted to add in the bigger ticket vices, and those probably shouldn’t be immediately convertible from ten minutes of tidying.
So I added the currency versa, so you could add weight to each task and each vice. That way I could get some bigger ticket items on the rewards side, and have a new motivation of not indulging in the smaller vices in favour of the big ones.
I even added watch integration to make it easier to track tasks as I do them so I don’t forget. Because of the watch component I added a Google Play Store workflow so it publishes to the testing tracks and a production track. Unlike phone apps, it’s not as easy to distribute watch apps for sideloading, so my sideload deployment page wouldn’t work. But now I have a workflow in place, and the process from adding a new feature to getting it on the internal testing track is a script execution away.
Moving data from my sideloaded app to the Play Store version was a matter of exporting the events and importing them back on the other app. Sure, you could have done the same with a database based solution, but I think it’s pretty cool to be able to see what your stored data actually looks like, so you have even more confidence in what the app actually tracks.
There is no free lunch, I was raised to work towards the things you want to have, and I guess I feel that includes indulgences. No shortcuts either, blood and or sweat must be shed! Should I be rethinking my approach to life? I think the reason I build apps is to avoid answering difficult questions like this.
One Line a Day
The other thing I wanted to be better at was writing more consistently. So I started a simple app called One Line a Day that lets you input one line about what happened today. It probably still needs a better design, but it works.
Then I scope creeped on myself and decided I should throw my photography interest in there too, and include a photo a day.
After a few days of using it I scope creeped again and thought it would be a great way to log habits I’d been meaning to do as well.
Then of course I wanted stats, calendar views, history and timeline views, more of them the more I used the app. The great thing is I didn’t have to think about data migration, changing schemas or corruption, because all those new features were just new events, or new ways of interpreting the existing ones.
This app got a lot more usage from me. Because of the nightly reminder, I always get a ping if I had not written something that day. But because sitting with a morning coffee out in the uteplats is the first thing I do, I get a moment to think about things in peace and I usually come up with some reflection and something I want to write down. Throughout the day, if something else more important comes up, the bar to write about it is very low, just one sentence. So I can open the app up and write it down.
With the app open, and all the things I have set out to do every day there, one of them on the list is bound to inspire me to make that the next thing I pick up. Whenever I find myself bored, instead of opting for the doom scrolling apps, I have it on my home screen and I peek in there first for some inspiration, and end up picking one of the things I have yet to cross off my list.
I like how it frames my mind and gently reminds me of things I wanted to do in the first place, so the next step of picking up that hobby just comes naturally. They’re not things that I HAVE to do, but they’re things that I wish I had more time to do, so the decision to do it is simply a no brainer.
Being able to see streaks of what I’d been putting my time into lately also helps me balance out, and even revisit the list. Nobody likes empty unlit dots, and it helps me evaluate whether that supposed thing I want to do still actually holds true.
The finding
I spent some time to reflect on these three apps which I built to hack my behavior. What is it that drove me to use one more than the other?
The health app was good, for a while I became more conscious about taking care of myself. It was tedious to have to log everything I ate, but I actually started to be more conscious about feeding myself healthier nutrients even though I didn’t log as much. The step counting and sleep monitoring was easy as long as I had my watch on, so I was more conscious about making sure my watch was charged and I wore it sleeping.
After a while, the indulgences on vices have toned down. Surprisingly, the habit of doing a little bit of must dos at a time has stuck and I do them anyway, again without having to obsess about logging them so I get my prize at the end.
One Line a Day is the one that I am still opening up and using, more because I know the app has the things I enjoy myself, no punishment or consequences. Normally, I would reach for a doom scrolling app where I know there will be endless content for entertainment. Sure I’d feel relaxed, but I already know I won’t be fulfilled.
With this app, I’d be reminded of all these things that my ideal self wants and enjoys doing, and if I end up picking up one of those things, I know I will feel accomplished.
Now that I’m easing back to the grind of work life, the must dos have suddenly taken up much of the routine time again. Why am I still opening One Line a Day? Because getting back on the hamster wheel is exactly when spending time on yourself needs safeguarding.
I’ve started to play musical instruments I’ve neglected, I’m working on a new crochet project, I’m getting a bit more planned physical activity into the schedule, and I’m certainly writing a lot more.
being in tech 