A long time ago, back when people were just starting to realize that the Internet could do more than publish text documents, I was a budding web developer. It was the late 1990s and the “Dot Com Bubble” was inflating. I got a degree in computer science and worked as a software engineer at IBM and a contractor for the US Navy. I had a bunch of personal projects that I was working on on my spare time, like a Chinese-English translator, a random fantasy name generator, historical timeline software, and blogging software.
Then in 2006 I abruptly stopped programming. I had switched careers into the legal intellectual property field. I got married and had three kids. Programming became a low priority for which I had little time.
Now, twenty years later, we live in a world where the Internet seems to be a basic human right. Everybody is on the Internet, and programming computers can be as easy as drag and drop, or asking an AI chat bot to do it for you.
I’ve heard a lot of great things about Lovable, an AI-powered “vibe coding” web app that will create new web apps for you. All you have to do is describe what you want your app to do, and Lovable will write all the code you need to get it working. They even host your web app on their site to ensure it works well without you needing to learn the nuances of installing code and setting up databases on a server.
I have a running list of app ideas I’ve kept over the years, so I picked one of the easier ones from the list and spent a week using Lovable’s free plan to implement the app. I’m very happy with the result. I used Lovable to develop an app called PeoplePing (it’s free and you can try it out right now).
PeoplePing works a lot like a contact list. You enter the names of contacts along with any other information you want to provide about them. Once you’ve entered a contact, you can then make notes on interactions you have with that person. You can also set up reminders to check in with that person.
For example, I can enter someone named Timothy Hay and note that his birthday is August 2 and he has a pair of rabbits named Ame and Arashi. Then I can create an “interaction” with him and note that I “grabbed a sandwich and coffee with him at Geno’s”. Then, I can also add him to my “Check-in rotation,” which would remind me to make follow-up contact with him in the future.
As someone who has reclusive tendencies, this app may be useful for me to remind me to contact certain people every once in awhile.
Check out the app: https://peopleping.lovable.app/
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