The Joy of Extremely Personal Software

Extremely Personal Software is a breath of fresh air. It's a sip of an ice-cold lemonade with a sprig of mint on a hot summers day. It's walk, alone on the beach, as the sun rises over the waves. It's the wind in your hair, the grass on your feet, the sound of children laughing. Extremely Personal Software is freedom. It's mental clarity.

I've been writing Extremely Personal Software (EPS) for just over one month now. Over this time, my personal software stack has ebbed and flowed. I've gone back and forth on different ideas; some things stuck, some didn't.

As of today, here are my apps that I use, in order of value and frequency of use:

• shell – web-based terminal, instant remote session to my laptop with custom command palette
• todo – extremely personal, simple todo app
• tech_talker – extremely personal, local dictation with personal dictionary
• weight – weight tracking, health app
• notes – extremely personal, simple notes app
• daily-brief – hooks into my email, sends an SMS via email with my top todo list item
• readings – an extremely minimal Catholic daily readings app
• budgeting – a simple budget tracking app

All of these apps are managed by observatory, which looks like this:

As my stack has matured, some things that I've really enjoyed have been:

• These apps working seamlessly together
  • Building the other apps on my phone with shell
  • daily-brief sending me the highest priority items on my todo list
  • Creating todo items or notes using Claude skills, through shell
• Figuring out something that works in one app, then applying to all
  • The "vibration API" makes them feel so nice as Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) on my iPhone – applied through the EPS mod system

Not Everything Can Be Extremely Personal

People ask me, "There are hundreds of notes apps, why build your own?"

The answer is, honestly, that I've never been happy with a notes app. The closest I've ever been to happy has been with the iPhone notes app, when it looked like this:

And the next happiest I've been was just using my code editor to write notes.

But now the iPhone notes app has dozens of text formatting options, headers, subheaders, check lists, attachments, tables, highlighting, indentation, etc., etc. I don't want any of that noise!

Apple tries to hide all of the nonsense under big + buttons, with menus, and sub-menus, and more sub-menus. Resulting in the worst, most average notes app. If you really did want to use any of these features, they're going to be multiple clicks away, hidden; and for what? So that the notes app can maintain a façade of simplicity?

To me, notes are extremely personal. I want it to fit my lifestyle and workflow to a T. In my opinion, the notes app is a great example of a service that you should create yourself. If you're technically savvy enough, you should have your own extremely personal notes app.

But not every app is feasible to make for yourself. For example, there will never be a web browser in the EPM package registry. Web browsers are enormous pieces of software, they have enormous security footprints, and for a multitude of other reasons, people will not be rolling their own web browsers.

_{There are definitely some web browsers that fit the Extremely Personal ethos more than others. Maybe it's time to make a switch.}

But that's okay. I encourage you to start building your own EPS stack, and see where that takes you. You might be surprised where you end up.

The Potential Side-Effects of EPS

Be warned that if you start forming your own EPS stack, you might notice side-effects.

Side-effect 1) A better email client

One side effect I caught recently: downloading Thunderbird.

After using my Extremely Personal Software, I just couldn't handle Gmail anymore.

I made the switch to a wonderful, open source tool. Thunderbird is an email and productivity app "that maximizes your freedoms".

It's right there, front and center:

Free Your Inbox. Maximize your freedoms.

I have done a fairly decent job over the last 15 or so years of maintaining my email inbox. But still, Gmail has amassed about 20,000 emails. They've taken control away, made bulk deletes difficult, added Gemini magic ✨ everywhere.

Thunderbird feels like a real email client. It doesn't think for me. I love that it lets me use my own brain.

Side-effect 2) Unsubscribing

Once I had built my EPS stack, and started using Thunderbird, things started to get quieter. Less ads were reaching me. Less unwanted news headlines.

This quietness made the few remaining, noisy services so much more obvious.

To my surprise, I also found myself unsubscribing from noisy newsletters, Substacks, and YouTube channels. The initial splash of EPS had rippled much further than I could have anticipated.

The Joy

I don't know if it's spring that's in the air here on the East Coast, or the Extremely Personal Software, or some third thing, but I've been having the most fun I've ever had writing software, writing about software, and changing the role of technology in my life.

Somehow it feels like the technology in my life is improving, whilst simultaneously the amount of technology in my life is shrinking.

At the end of the day technology should serve us, help us, and improve our lives. If it's not genuinely useful and improving our lives, it should not exist. For a while there, it did not feel that technology was helping us.

So here's to Extremely Personal Software, which does not demand our attention, or feed us with algorithms. Software that helps us and then gets out of the way. Get back to the real world. Go on a run, go skinny dipping, go out dancing, eat an ice cream cone, feel the sun on your skin, take a joy ride.