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.

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.

Ux on Pragmatic Tech

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

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