I’m building a Todo list app. How daring, I know. My reasoning behind it fairly straightforward, not unlike any other person building one of these things – I’m bored, and want to play with things that I’ve never used before. A Todo app is small enough in scope that I can build one in a reasonable amount of time, given the hours that I’m currently willing to allocate towards working on it, while also giving me opportunities to use and learn tech that I haven’t used before.

At least, that’s what I told myself when I started. It’s been a couple of months since then, and my motivation for continuing has shifted from a place of curiousity to a place of desire. I’ve been going down a rabbit hole around self-hosting and owning your infrastructure, and being someone that cares about these things, have made the decisison that Lists (the app, very clever name, I know) will be MIT licensed, self-hostable, and open source.

I’m still scratching an itch, but with the added upside of possibly scratching it for others as well.

Something most people don’t know about me is that I used to do graphic design when I was in my early teens. In that time, I developed an eye for detail, which as I’ve grown up has turned into a passion for UI and UX, even though objectively I’m not experienced with building either. I’m aiming to provide users with a clean, snappy experience that gets out of their way and allows them to focus on decluttering their mind and getting things done. In short, I’m going to do my best to make sure I’m not shipping a dumpster fire.

For people that aren’t interested in or aren’t skilled enough to self host, I plan on offering Lists as a SaaS for a flat monthly rate. There won’t be any differences between the two. What you see on GitHub is what runs on the server.

I’ve also had ideas for more projects to start once I’m finished with this one, and I’ll be following the same ethos with those as I am this one. Self-hostable, permissively licensed, and always open source. Who knows, I might even spin this into a brand.

Anyways, I’m starting to ramble a bit. Expect another post going into more detail on some of the design decisions for Lists, and how I’m making user privacy and security a top priority.