Here we are, in the second half of 2026. If you build software for a living, you've seen the big shift going through this industry, or you're still in the middle of it. This text isn't about that. There are enough of those already, and they find you whether you look for them or not.
It's about a smaller shift, one that I, like a lot of people, ended up in: building software that is truly personal.
It started for me early in 2026, when LLMs got good enough to change how I work. For most of my career I've been a front-end developer who knew a bit about databases, DevOps and design. Now I can take an idea from start to finish on my own. Ideas that used to take months now take an evening, and it feels like I could build almost anything, even manage my own servers, databases, and deployments, things I always used to leave to others.
In practice that meant leaving Vercel and managed platforms behind. Now everything runs on a Hetzner VPS in the EU, deployed with Dokploy, and it's all open source. For the first time the whole stack is mine, not just the front end, and I can put whatever I want on it: small experiments, maps of the city I live in, tools for learning, tools to monitor my projects.
I wanted software that was completely personal and suited to my needs.
So that's what I did. I built a system for myself. Part of it is public: my writing, links I've saved, a way to contact me, the usual things you'd expect on a personal website. Behind it are four small tools only I use:
- A place to write, where this text starts
- A link saver, with Chrome and Firefox extensions that save straight to my database
- A small Anki-like app for learning German, with spaced repetition, voice input, and Mistral AI filling in grammar and examples
- A dashboard that shows what's running on Dokploy, where all my projects live
That's all of it. A bit over 350 commits, one Next.js app, one SQLite file.
It's also a PWA, and that part still feels a little unreal. It sits on my iPhone home screen next to apps from the App Store, with its own icon, its own launch screen, and no browser around it. It loads from its own cache before it goes to the network, so it opens as fast as a native app. Nobody reviews it or approves it. There's no store listing to update and no release to ship. I push a commit and it deploys.
Because it's all one app with one database, adding something new doesn't take much. Notes would just be a table and a form. Reminders would be a date and something that checks it every morning. No new account, no new subscription, no new app to open. Just another screen in something I already use every day. That's the difference between a system and a pile of apps: when I need something new, I spend an afternoon building it instead of going out to buy it. Maybe a shared list for my family. Maybe my Hue lights turning on when the No. 12 tram is almost home. The strange part is how far you can take it, and the hard part is knowing where to stop.
It isn't free, though. Nobody else updates the server, sets up the backups, or fixes things when they break at eleven at night. When you own everything, you own the annoying parts too.
Why not just use something that already exists?
Each of these four tools has a better commercial version. Anki has years of research behind it and plenty of plugins. Grafana would put my dashboard to shame.
But nobody sells all four together, working as one. Four products means four accounts, four subscriptions, four different designs, all made for an average user who doesn't exist.
I also got tired of switching. I saved links in Pocket until it shut down, then in a Notion database. Every change meant moving my data and hoping someone else's plans matched mine. Now I build it myself, and it does exactly what I want.
You can't buy a personal system. You find out what it should be by building it. I started out just wondering what a personal website should be. Something personal, or a place to show my work? Why not both. So I started building what I actually needed.
And it isn't just me. If you work online, you probably have the same problem I had: too many subscriptions that don't talk to each other, with your data spread across all of them. You could have one system instead, one that does all of it.
I think this is where software is going. Not for everyone, and not all at once, but away from apps made for a million people and toward systems made for you. Systems that fit your data, your language, your habits.
You won't find them in the App Store, or on any other platform. They have to be built around how you work, teach, create, or learn. The tools are here now, and so is the time for fully personal systems.