Background
Hey everyone,
I’ve been working on developing a personal planner over the last two years called Alpen. Yes I know another todo app. I’ve used a lot of apps to try and manage planning out my days but I’ve never been able to consistently/productively do so. Alpen was initially motivated by my personal problems but it was also a platform to learn more about Elixir and it’s ecosystem after beginning to use it for work.
In my opinion other apps file short because they are just a big list of things todos. Alpen’s philosophy is that until it actually enters your calendar that todo is in purgatory.
The name originally comes from the A.L.P.E.N method, ultimately it expanded into a few more techniques like time blocking and the Eisenhower Matrix. If you haven’t heard of these no worries. Alpen aims to instill these “best” practices into the app so that planning has more of a flow.
Why Alpen?
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Planning as we all know is hard. Alpen provides a more opinionated way to plan your day. It takes a little getting used to but after the learning curve, you have a framework and more certainty in the system.
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Life is chaotic. Alpen tries to make it easy to jot things down quickly and provides mechanisms so that it’s simple to give more of an intention to when you do things rather than creating things and forgetting
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Giving back. Alpen will ultimately be a subscription model, however I aim to make it an affordable option and I’m hoping by leveraging Elixir and the ecosystem it allows a solo dev to keep cost low so that more people benefit. Furthermore, I’m only able to even create this project due to all the amazing work others have done so I would love to use those earnings in the future to pay something back to the ecosystem
Technology
Speaking of technology these are just a few of the libraries that help Alpen run.
- Elixir/Phoenix/Liveview (Core)
- Ash
- Oban
- Corex
Roadmap
Alpen is ambitious by nature. It really wants to help create a framework without being an all in one tool. It’s a personal project management! This means that it should be able to co-exist with tools like Linear/Jira. A manager creates your tickets in those tools, Alpen takes those tickets and makes them yours. You break them into pieces so that things are manageable.
Alpen is not a note taking app. It has places where you can write notes but it ultimately aims to work in tandem with more complete note taking apps like Obsidian.
So although Alpen has been my system for the last two years there’s much more I want to do. That’s why I need more people to give it a try offer any feedback they’d like.
Who it’s for
This is primarily at a state for Knowledge Workers, people who work with a laptop for their work day. A mobile app will be added down the line but the focus for the time being is focusing on the core interactions and creating a strong foundation that people find invaluable to help plan their day.
I’m not trying to sell you that Alpen will solve all your problems. Planning is hard and will always be hard. I’m hoping Alpen gives you a little more control throughout your day as well as provide you more tools so that your planning abilities are elevated. It unfortunately is not a silver bullet and it will always feel like we can use a couple more hours at the end of each day.
Please give it a go, there is an existing article that try and highlight some more of the concepts Alpen builds on. I’ll definitely be adding more but I’d love to hear what people think and really build a tool that makes an impact!
