Website: Future Problems!
Client: Me (and maybe you?)
Technologies used: HTML, PHP, SQL, CSS
Contributions: Built the entire front and back end, wrote all user interface copy, drew the cute little robot mascot.
Demo: Future-Problems.com

Sometimes, despite there being roughly three million productivity tools on the Internet, you want something that doesn’t quite exist exactly as you want it to exist. So you gather up your PHP, SQL and other coding knowledge and just code it yourself. We all can relate to that.

In my case, I wanted a way to just file thoughts away — be they things I need to do soonish or just random ideas or musings I can’t act on right that minute — and completely forget about them until I’m reminded of them the following morning. And I wanted a way to do this simply without cluttering up the to-do list I currently use or jury rigging multiple third party services (any one of which could disappear or break comparability without notice) in order to achieve this seemingly simple goal.

So, using nothing but a database and some code, I built exactly what I wanted for myself. And, just in case anyone else out there wants the same thing I do in exactly the same way I want it, I built a reasonably pretty interface, added support for people to create their own accounts, gave it a fun name, added some documentation, and even gave it a cute hand-drawn mascot.

You can visit Future Problems! here and create your own account if you feel like it. It’s free to use and unencumbered by attached strings or catches. I don’t even save any of the user data: Once a future problem is sent to you, it goes into a holding area for one day, in case you want to resend it to yourself tomorrow, and is wiped completely after that time passes. Isn’t that refreshing?