Why I Built Buddy: The Free App I Wish I'd Had When My Dad Got Sick

Pragmatic Sysadmin — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

My dad called me at 2 AM.

“I can’t find my medication,” he said. “I don’t know what day it is.”

He was 76. He had dementia — early stage, we thought, until it wasn’t. What he actually had was a UTI that no one had caught, accelerating everything. But at 2 AM, I didn’t know that. I just knew he was confused, scared, and alone in his apartment 400 miles away.

I drove up that morning. Sat with him. Watched him stare at his phone like it was a foreign object — which, in a sense, it was. Small text. Too many apps. Notifications everywhere. He’d been using it for 10 years and suddenly it might as well have been written in hieroglyphics.

That’s when I started building Buddy.

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Why I Built Buddy: The Free App I Wish I'd Had When My Dad Got Sick