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Hey HN. I built this to solve a pretty mundane problem — my family is terrible at keeping track of household tasks and shopping lists. We tried shared apps but
by danialkhilji 14d ago
Hey HN. I built this to solve a pretty mundane problem — my family is terrible at keeping track of household tasks and shopping lists. We tried shared apps but nobody stuck with them. Turns out the thing that actually works is a screen in the kitchen that everyone walks past.
I had an old laptop running Linux (Garuda flavour) and an iPad nobody was using, so I put them together. The laptop sits in a drawer running Docker, the iPad connects over WiFi and shows the dashboard fullscreen.
The main features are task management with automatic weekly rotation (so no more arguing about whose turn it is), a shared shopping list with store grouping, family notes, prayer times matched to our local mosque, weather, and a calendar with birthdays.
Stack is React/TypeScript/Tailwind on the frontend, FastAPI/SQLAlchemy/SQLite on the backend, all behind nginx in Docker. One command to deploy.
The hardest part was designing for a touchscreen. Buttons need to be big enough for fingers, you need to be able to read things from across the room, and the whole thing needs to feel more like a kitchen appliance than a website. Took a lot of iteration to get right.
My family has been using it daily for about three weeks now. My dad hasn't figured out that "take out bins" follows him every week because of the auto-rotation. He just thinks he's unlucky.
135 tests, strict TypeScript, CI pipeline. MIT licensed. Happy to talk about architecture or the touchscreen UX stuff if anyone's interested.