Combined from three posts on my old blog, 2018. Revised.

When I started writing software, I built small Android apps for problems I’d actually run into on job sites. None of them were trying to change anyone’s life. That was the point.

Easy Time Card

A lot of offices still use paper time cards. They take time, there’s no room to write, they get smudged and lost, someone has to drive them to the office, and someone has to sort them.

Time-tracking software isn’t always better. It comes with subscriptions, upgrades, a learning curve, and the quiet fear that the next update will move every button. People who aren’t paid to figure out software drag their feet, and I don’t blame them.

So I built the compromise: two buttons. Clock in, then press the big red button to clock out. “Report Time” emails a clean, readable time card, with start times, end times and totals per job, to up to three people. Workers stay on the honor system, since they can edit the email to fix a missed clock-in, the same way they would on paper. It was just the paper time card everyone already knew, in digital form.

Foot Candle Light Meter

Building codes across North America still describe lighting in foot-candles, and so do many product labels. Almost every smartphone has an ambient light sensor for adjusting screen brightness, and Android reports it in lux. Converting that to foot-candles is about as close to the “Hello World” of scientific apps as you can get.

The accuracy depends on hardware I can’t inspect, so it’s an approximation. But it lets an ordinary person check whether a room is close to where its lighting needs to be.

Sound Proof STC

Construction is mostly about building barriers between us and the elements, or between us and other annoying people. Sound is one of the hardest barriers to get right.

Acoustic engineers and testing labs produce accurate, valuable data, but it rarely reaches the people actually building walls. Contractors and designers end up guessing: build something, listen, add more until it’s tolerable. A lab test is like a Learjet. It’s fast and precise, but most people need a car today.

This app gave the people making those everyday decisions a quick way to grab sound data, review it later, and make a better-informed call, even with zero acoustics background. It wasn’t perfect, but it beat guessing.

The common thread

Each app took one small, real annoyance and removed it, with as little for the user to learn as possible. That’s still how I think about tools: the best ones disappear into the job.