Introducing Pickaday

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 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 is here!

The nerdy stuff

I’ve been using Laravel 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 or Inertia, I really wanted to keep things simple—especially for version 1.0. I wound up using Blade, Tailwind, and Alpine.js. 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 and Mailgun before, but they’re very complicated for simple transaction emails. I signed up for Resend and within about 5 minutes I was off to the races.

I hope you enjoy it!

Like 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!