---
title: Introducing Pickaday
description: The easiest way for you, your family, friends, fantasy football league, D&D group, neighborhood, or whoever to vote on event dates together!
pubDate: 2025-02-19
---

import Figure from '../../components/Figure.astro'
import Pickaday from '../../assets/pickaday.webp'

If you’re like my family we often need to coordinate schedules for holidays and other get-togethers. Problem is, group message threads get noisy and someone might be busy and miss hours of discussion.

There are services that make event voting and discussions easier. [Doodle](https://doodle.com) has been a long-time favorite, but has increasingly become filled with ads and distractions that make an already difficult problem more difficult still.

I wanted to take a crack at it. I wanted to make a tool where the target audience is *my* family. Something simple, fun, and—of course—privacy conscious and without ads. After a couple weeks of off and on development [Pickaday](https://pickadayapp.com) is here!

<Figure
  src={Pickaday}
  alt="Pickaday’s result view showing an event poll with four options and various votes between them"
/>

## The nerdy stuff

I’ve been using [Laravel](https://laravel.com/) for quite some time now and thought it was a perfect fit for this project. It was a cinch to implement a handful of models, setup my database, and I had a litany of choices for the front-end.

While I could’ve used something like [Livewire](https://livewire.laravel.com/) or [Inertia](https://inertiajs.com/), I really wanted to keep things simple—especially for version 1.0. I wound up using Blade, [Tailwind](https://tailwindcss.com/), and [Alpine.js](https://alpinejs.dev/). It’s a basic stack, but extremely powerful and made prototyping fast.

The last interesting bit is the email delivery service. I’ve used [SendGrid](https://sendgrid.com) and [Mailgun](https://www.mailgun.com/) before, but they’re very complicated for simple transaction emails. I signed up for [Resend](https://resend.com/) and within about 5 minutes I was off to the races.

## I hope you enjoy it!

Like [Cicolator](/introducing-cicolator), this app is a scratch I’ve needed to itch for a while. I hope you enjoy using it as much as I have building it!