Personal

FamilyApp

A passwordless web app that keeps an extended family connected: a shared directory of birthdays, anniversaries, and addresses, an auto-built family tree, and daily reminders so nobody misses a milestone.

The Challenge

An extended family's birthdays, anniversaries, and addresses lived in an aging Excel workbook that a single person maintained by hand. More than a hundred records spread across dozens of households, the information went stale, and remembering a birthday depended on someone thinking to open the spreadsheet. Ten to thirty relatives of every age and comfort level with technology had no easy, shared, always-current way to stay in touch, and the usual answer, yet another account with yet another password, was exactly the barrier that would keep older family members out.

The Solution

I designed and built FamilyApp with Claude Code as a small, private web app for one family. Relatives join from an email invitation and sign in with a magic link, with no password to remember and optional two-factor for anyone who wants it. Everyone can view the whole directory, and each person can edit only their own branch of the family. The app shows an upcoming-events dashboard for the next thirty days, a searchable people directory, and a family tree built automatically from parent-and-child household links. A daily reminder engine emails each person their upcoming birthdays and anniversaries in their own timezone. A one-time importer read the legacy Excel workbook and did the tedious work of splitting names, parsing addresses, detecting anniversaries, marking deceased entries, and mapping households into a clean data model.

The Impact

The family's shared history moved out of one fragile spreadsheet and into a living app the whole family helps keep current. Reminders now go out on their own, so birthdays and anniversaries stop slipping by. Passwordless sign-in removed the friction that usually keeps less technical relatives from ever logging in. It is a purpose-built tool that does one thing well, keeping an extended family connected, and a reminder that modern tooling makes it practical to build a polished, real app for an audience of one family.