A personal app to organize work and personal life in one full calendar: sport, expenses, tasks, appointments.
My daily life was scattered: runs in Garmin, expenses in one place, tasks and appointments in another. I wanted to see everything in one place, with my sports activities in it.
Trade-off: Garmin offers no official access: I use an unofficial library, which I isolated from the back end. One more service to run and protect, but a fragile dependency that doesn't contaminate the rest. And when Garmin refuses the connection, the real error reaches the screen instead of a vague message.
Trade-off: Gemini has a free tier, the Anthropic API doesn't: for a personal project, the choice was quick. Downside: the coach stays silent without a key, and the model name has already needed a fix.
Trade-off: A stranger can't lock my account from their own machine. Downside: the counter lives in memory, resets to zero on restart and isn't shared across instances.
The hardest part wasn't the code: it was pinning down my idea and giving it shape. Going from a fuzzy need, organizing my work and personal life, to a concrete product.
Depending on an unofficial API means planning from day one where it will break, and telling the user plainly.