Introducing the Gizmo Life Planner

When Life Hands You Lemons, Build an Application

Why Gizmo?

I spent eight months unemployed. It was a long stretch and it was tough. I've spent years creating cool software, first as a developer, then manager, then director and so on, and for the last 15 years or so, as an executive. Then suddenly, you're not wanted anymore.

While interviewing for VP level positions I was told, on more than one occasion, that I was "too experienced". Really? For a VP position? You said the quiet part out loud.

Sadly, especially in tech, age and experience are punished, rather than valued. Discrimination, in all its many forms, is ugly. But the schadenfreude-ish upside to age discrimination is that we all get old. You're not immune, and your time will come. Mine did. I imagine young me preferred to hire younger developers too. It's human.

When I'm frustrated, or sad, or out-of-sorts, I play music, write and build software. These all-consuming endeavors put you into a state of flow and your problems vanish, at least for a little while. And this time, the result was Gizmo Life Planner.

Gizmo in a Nutshell

Gizmo is a lot of "little" applications, each designed to make my life a bit easier (and now, yours too). I created a plugin-based architecture, where each application is relatively independent of the others. This makes it easy to build different groups of features in small, testable units, without a huge time commitment to any of them. You can turn off the ones you're not interested in.

So far, I've built plugins for:

• Retirement Planning, with a focus on FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early)
• Todos, Pomodoro timers, and activity oriented features
• Notes with a rich text editor
• Drawings to show relationships and dependencies between content
• Custom content types — create your own types
• AI integration (using Google's free Gemini API)

Not bad for eight month's work.

The best way to learn about these features is to give Gizmo a try. It's completely free and I've got no plans to monetize it.

Rather than talk about each of the features here, let me tell you what I like most about it.

It Runs Completely in Your Browser

Mobile apps are great, but their screens are too darn small. Most of my work time is spent on a laptop using a browser. So I built Gizmo as a Progressive Web App (PWA) that runs entirely in your browser. It's right where I need it, ready to go at all times — in a browser tab. There is nothing to install and it updates automatically.

It's Private

All of your data is stored in your browser's Indexed Database, a standard, powerful built-in database provided in each major browser. Your data never leaves your browser or your computer, and you can clear it at any time using the browser's Content Settings feature. A great thing about browsers — they are very "security conscious". A lot of thought has gone into their security/privacy features over many, many years.

It's Cheap to Host

I like Gizmo and I want to share it with others. But I don't want to go broke doing so. One thing all developers know — using hosted services at cloud providers (like AWS) gets expensive quickly. By developing Gizmo as a PWA it basically gets installed into your browser once (not counting updates) and that's it. One and done. So that means I don't have to pay more than pennies per month to host it. Which means it costs me almost nothing to let you use it for free.