Building my own 'app'
I’m building an app for my wife and myself! It’s called ParenTime, and the aim is to help free up our many to-do lists and the tracking of things we do for our son to “give us back some time.” While it’s primarily for our use, I plan to make it publicly available—maybe other parents who work in a similar way may find it useful!
Some Background
My wife and I tracked baby care (nappy changes, feedings, changes, etc.) in a physical book we’d write in, as well as in Excel sheets and various apps available. Similarly, we tried to track activities we’d like to do with our son for his development in Excel sheets and other apps. However, the experience of using those solutions was cumbersome to manage, and some apps even went from free to paid and held our data ransom!
As a result, I decided to build a solution myself that was tailored for our lifestyle and way of doing things. In addition, we spent many months or even years researching baby care routines and child development activities and formulated them into the routines we used over the years. These learnings may help other parents too.
Tech Stack
Okay, on to some of the fun bits—what I’m using to build it. The coding side of things won’t be too exciting: TanStack Start for the web UI and backend for that UI, with .NET services on the backend to handle the data, and said data being stored in a PostgreSQL database.
Where it’s a bit more interesting for me is in where I’m hosting it—on AWS. Again, not the most exciting, but an area I have limited exposure to. I’ve worked extensively with Azure and want to delve more into AWS, both to help in my day job and to work towards some AWS certifications. What better way to learn than to build something!
What’s Next
As mentioned in an earlier post on my lessons learned from blogging these past few months, sharing may be less frequent. However, in this ‘series’ of posts on building ParenTime, I’ll be sharing some of the prep on this journey—designing the app architecture, infrastructure, requirements, and user journeys that I am planning to build.
For now, it’s heads-down and building mode!