Blog
Notes on a calmer household.
· 3 min read
Twenty-seven milliseconds
An hourly job that took most of a second now takes a fraction of it. Why we read the database's own statistics, and why a shared cost matters.
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A new floor under the phone app
The phone app now runs on the newest React Native and Expo platform. Here is what that means, what we found along the way, and how to see which build you have.
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Today means your today
For months, a chore due today could read overdue from eight in the evening. The bug was the server's idea of what day it was. It is fixed everywhere.
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Where your sign-in lives
The September build of the phone app moves your session into the device keystore, and the household's live channel now requires a signed-in member to listen.
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Nothing on the board should move
We found the dashboard jumping 350 pixels on a slow connection. Fixing it meant refusing the obvious fix.
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Enter a price once
Turn on price tracking for a grocery list and it keeps a running total, remembers what each item cost, and feeds the meal plan's budget estimate.
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The boring week
Nothing on your board looks different this week. Underneath it: faster scans, faster vehicle pages, quieter nights, and an app that can heal itself.
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Eleven recalls, one card
Alerts now group by the thing they're about, count themselves honestly, and sort by severity — so the loudest thing on the board is the one that matters.
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Your house has renewal dates
Insurance policies now live alongside the things they cover — with the renewal date working for you instead of for your provider.
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Sherpsy is a departure board now
We redesigned the whole product around one metaphor: the airport board. Type and geometry carry the identity, and color still means exactly one thing.
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Allowance is a ledger, not a promise
Chores now carry real money: effort points, payouts, approval, and three jars — Spend, Save, Give.
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What's for dinner is a data question
Meals just shipped: recipes, a week of planned dinners, and an honest answer to "what can I make with what's in the house."
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An invite is a front door
Getting the rest of the household in is the step most family apps fumble. Here's how joining Sherpsy works, and why nobody shares a password.
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The command center you already own
A calm family wall display usually costs several hundred dollars. You probably have the parts in a drawer.
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The best home screen is a blank one
Why Sherpsy is achromatic by default, and reserves a single color for the one thing that needs you.
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One product, two screens
A feature that exists on the web and not on the phone is not a shipped feature. On keeping two codebases honest.
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Nothing is written without you confirming it
Extraction from a photo is useful and occasionally wrong. The rule that makes it safe is boring and absolute.
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Getting the house ready for summer
Cooling, water, and the outdoor equipment that has been sitting untouched since September.
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Two-way calendar sync, and the echo problem
Syncing calendars in one direction is straightforward. In both directions, an event can bounce forever.
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Every number needs a reference point
A dashboard that shows you a 3 has told you nothing. On the design of figures that mean something.
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A chore rotation that survives a bad week
Every system works when everyone is well and present. The test is the week when they are not.
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The tools you own and can't find
The second-most-common reason to buy a tool is not owning one. The most common is owning one somewhere.
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What we mean by "private by design"
The phrase is on everybody's marketing page. Here are the specific decisions it stands for here.
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Reading a screen from across the kitchen
Designing for eight feet is not designing for arm's length with bigger text.
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Spring cleaning is an inventory
You are already touching every object in the house. That is the expensive part of knowing what you own.
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Warranty windows close quietly
No manufacturer will remind you that you have six weeks left. The date is knowable and almost never known.
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Receipts are the most boring important paper you own
Thermal paper fades in about two years. Warranties and returns both need what was printed on it.
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The app should be silent
Most software measures success by engagement. For a household system, engagement is the symptom.
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Row-level security, explained at the kitchen table
How a multi-household app keeps one family's data away from another's — and why the answer should not be application code.
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Estimating mileage without tracking you
You can know roughly how far a car has gone without following it. The math is simple; the restraint is the point.
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Everything we didn't build
A household app can absorb any feature you point at it. Here is what we have deliberately left out, and why.
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Winter is hard on cars
Cold does not break cars randomly. It exposes the battery, the tires, and the fluid you meant to top up in October.
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Resolutions fail; routines don't
January promises are a bet on future willpower. The households that stay on top of things made a different bet.
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The year-end household reset
Ninety minutes between the holidays and January that pays for itself several times over.
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A house that's empty for a week
Leaving is mostly about water, heat, and one other person knowing what to do.
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The gift list nobody else can see
A household app that shows everything to everyone has a specific problem in December.
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December is a scheduling problem
The stress is not the shopping. It is four calendars converging on three weeks with no slack.
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Cooking for a crowd is a list problem
The cooking is not what goes wrong at a big meal. The sequencing and the shopping are.
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The clocks change and so should your reminders
One of the few remaining household rituals that everyone still performs on the same weekend. Use it.
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Passwords are not the hard part; access is
Every household has a password problem. Very few have thought about the access problem underneath it.
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What happens if you're in the hospital
An uncomfortable question with a practical answer, and it is not "give someone your password".
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The furnace filter problem
A five-dollar part on a ninety-day interval, and almost nobody manages it. Worth understanding why.
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Fall maintenance, in the order that matters
Not a list of everything. The four things that are much cheaper done in October than in February.
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A vault the server cannot read
What end-to-end encryption actually means for household documents, and the trade it forces you to accept.
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The recipe you make every week
Most households cook from a repertoire of about nine meals. Writing them down is worth more than any recipe app.
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Two households, one kid, one calendar
Co-parenting is a coordination problem with unusually high stakes for getting the details wrong.
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Back to school without the group chat
Every September a household absorbs a hundred dates from six sources. Here is how to land them once.
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What a household should keep in writing
Not a filing system. A short list of facts that are expensive to reconstruct and cheap to record.
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Teaching a teenager to own a chore
The goal is not compliance. It is handing over a piece of the household's operation, permanently.
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The five-minute household audit
Six questions. If you cannot answer them, you have found this quarter's work.
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Notifications are a budget
Every alert an app sends spends attention it cannot earn back. Most household apps are overdrawn by week two.
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A pantry you can see from the store
Half of grocery waste is buying what you already have. The other half is not buying what you needed.
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The lawn mower is an asset too
Households track cars and ignore the twenty other machines they own, most of which have a service interval and a warranty.
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Lending things without losing them
Nobody steals a borrowed drill. They just forget, and so do you, and eighteen months later it is gone.
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Summer breaks the routine on purpose
School term is a scaffold. When it comes down for eight weeks, most household systems fall over with it.
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Before the road trip
A twenty-minute check that costs nothing and occasionally saves a vacation.
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Who's picking up whom
The hardest scheduling problem in a house is not the events. It is the transportation between them.
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The appliance manual you'll never read again
Keep the serial number and the purchase date. You can find the manual online in ten seconds; you cannot find those.
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An odometer reading is a fact; everything else is an estimate
On the difference between a number a person typed in and a number software worked out — and why that difference should always be visible.
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Recalls don't come to you
Safety recalls are published constantly and almost never reach the person holding the product. That gap is not your fault, but it is your problem.
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The paperwork drawer is a search problem
You do not need to file everything. You need to find six things quickly, usually on a bad day.
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Spring is when the house tells you what it needs
A short, unromantic walk-around for the end of winter — and why writing down what you find matters more than fixing it today.
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What your car actually needs, and when
Service intervals are written in two units at once — months and miles — and that is why people miss them.
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Chores are a routing problem
Chore charts fail because they assign work to whoever was standing there when the chart was made. Households are not that static.
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A grocery list two people can edit at once
The shopping list is the most-used shared object in a house, and the one most likely to lose your edits.
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Why the shared calendar keeps failing
Everybody has tried sharing a calendar. Here is the specific thing that breaks, and what a household calendar has to do differently.
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One household, one account each
Why we did not build a family app around a single shared login, and what changes when everyone has their own.
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The household runs on someone's memory
In most families one person is quietly holding the whole schedule in their head. That is not organization — it is a single point of failure.
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