This was a grief project. Some people make art when they're soul searching, and making apps has always been a bit of an artistic outlet for me. Earlier this year my mother committed suicide and two weeks later the company I worked for laid off my entire division. After taking some time to grieve and process I started building something just for me, just for fun, just because I wanted to.
Dexter has been a slow project that started as paper sketches at my kitchen table and slowly morphed into a codebase. It allowed me to play with tools I wanted to get better at like Postgres and Typescript while also letting me try (and in some cases fail) experimenting with new-to-me tools like Tailwind, Supabase, Tauri, Electron, and Vite.
Small portions of the app and site were "vibe coded", but 99% is hand-crafted code (not necessarily good code), graphics, and data models. This was meant to be a fun project where I learned things just because I wanted to learn something, not a race to see how fast I could grind out a product.
For an example of "unnecessary but fun", I made each SVG on the marketing site twice with Figma - once in a light theme and again in a dark theme - so if you toggle your OS's dark mode, everything should change, even the images.
A few things about the app:
- Yeah, I know, it's an Electron app. I tried using Tauri and other tools but hit a few snags. The Electron ecosystem was incredibly mature and easy to use in comparison
- The app is open source [0] and so is the marketing site [1]
- Some friends and I have been using it daily for a few months and really enjoy it compared to our old multi-tool workflows
- Dexter is the name of my 12(?) year old husky, hence the dog branding
- There is a pricing widget on the marketing site but the app is currently totally free. I might integrate Stripe soon if (and only if) that feels like a fun project, but the goal isn't to get rich or even turn a profit, it's to have fun and build something genuinely useful that I use every day
There are a bunch of features I would love to add and enhancements I would like to make, and eventually I will. Currently, I pick up a feature just because it sounds fun that day and I put it down when it is no longer fun. It might not be a good business model, but it has been a wonderful antidote to an industry rife with burnout and a personal life that's been a little out of control.
I hope you enjoy it and maybe build something for yourself, just because it sounds fun.
If anyone gives it a try I will be in the comments today and happy to answer any questions!
