The One for Mama

EP. 01

Having an OCD brain means that even in the midst of 24/7 caretaking, I can’t let go of the one thing I think would make my life easier.

My mom had surgery, and I was on full-time caretaking duty along with tracking her pain medication intake.

Like a good Millennial, I started with a spreadsheet in the Notes app. Copy-pasting every single entry. The problem is when my mom would wake up in the middle of the night, take a pill, and forget the time by morning.

Instead of just writing it down on paper like a normal human being, I built an app.

I started out by sketching how I wanted the app to look and feel. I made some mockups in Illustrator. The design was simple. One click = timestamp.

I uploaded my mockups and desired user interface into ChatGPT, and asked it to give me a prompt for Replit to build the app.

Then I pasted the prompt into Replit and had it build the app. Honestly, the step from mockup to the first iteration in Replit, took about 15 minutes.

From there, the basic functionality was there, but I wanted it to sync across both devices. I had to add a simple database layer. That's where my data science nerd comes in. I wanted somethign super lightweight, so I just went with Google Sheets. You can use a Google Sheets API to connect it to your app, so it updates everytime the user clicks a button. This also allows it to sync across all devices.

I added some final touches, like a cute home icon, and deployed it! All in all, this took 2 hours to build.

She's recovered now, but this little app? Saved our sanity during the hardest 4 weeks.

If you’ve been a caretaker and can relate, check out the demo. What should I build next?

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