Software That's Never Been Done: On Building Things That Should Exist But Don't

Pragmatic Sysadmin — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I had a problem.

My dad had dementia. He couldn’t remember if he’d taken his pills. He couldn’t remember what day it was. He couldn’t reliably use the phone he’d been using for a decade.

I looked at the App Store. I found 47 medication reminder apps. Every single one of them had: user accounts, push notification permissions, onboarding flows, settings screens, cloud sync, subscription upsells.

Not one of them was: open the app, tap green when you’ve taken your pill, done.

So I built Buddy. And I kept running into the same reaction from everyone I showed it to: “why doesn’t this already exist?”

That’s the question behind this post.

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Software That's Never Been Done: On Building Things That Should Exist But Don't