Devin Jeffery

I call it raccoon mode — when I catch myself rummaging through my kitchen without a thought in my brain.

Raccoon mode kicks in automatically when I'm deep in thought working through something, after a meeting marathon, when I want to celebrate, or when I'm stressed. All that to say, it's not going anywhere.

Calorie tracking apps don’t work for me

Even the AI ones. If I go even 1 calorie over my goal, it feels like I failed. If I stayed under the calorie goal but my macros were off, it feels like I failed. I know these tools help a lot of people, they just don’t work for me.

I decided to build an app for myself

What I am looking for is balance and more mindful eating. This is where I had an idea: why don’t I use Cursor to build myself a food journal app? Some of these exist already but I wanted something simpler.

My idea was that before I’m about to eat something, I snap a quick picture of it and mark how healthy or unhealthy it is. By snapping a photo before I eat, it gives me a second to decide if I am actually hungry or if I’ve just entered raccoon mode again. By showing me a simple overview of how healthy I’ve been this week, I can decide if I can fit in a little sweet treat or if I should maybe skip it.

I built a proof of concept and had it on my phone in 25 minutes

I hopped into Cursor and figured out how to push an app to my phone pretty quickly. It was ugly and clunky, but WOW… I have an actual app on my phone that I could start testing in my daily life.

After a few days of letting my phone eat first, I realized that there was something here for me. Seeing actual photos of what I ate had such a bigger emotional impact on me than just seeing calorie and macro counts. It also felt judgement free. Here is what you ate, do with that info what you will.

I spent 5 months asking if I could, not if I should

I spent lots of time tweaking designs, bloating it with complex features just because I could, learning where the bounds of SwiftUI are, and tracking my eating along the way. I built out some things like pattern recognition, I integrated with HealthKit to see how my physical activity affected my eating habits.

The problem was, I didn't have the core experience figured out and I was just throwing a bunch of half baked ideas at the wall. If I were in a time crunch and dealing with business needs, this all could have been seen as wasting time and resources, but honestly it was really helpful in figuring out what I do and do not want this app to become.

Here's the graveyard of screenshots from my silly little experiments.

Nikhil is pushing me to reign it in and post about it along the way

My friend Nikhil came to me recently and showed me how he accidentally built an app using Claude (hilarious that this is possible) when he was trying to work through some fitness problems he was having. He also came up with a challenge: let’s try to get our apps into TestFlight by the end of the year so we can beta test each other’s apps, and let's post along the way - see his post here.

Time to cut the fluff and all of the noisy features that I barely understand and get the basics right by December 31. The latest is the main image at the top of this post. I’ll keep posting along the way with some of the lessons learned, weird stuff I tried, ideas I have for the future as I try to get this sucker live.

TK hosted a 2 day hackathon where the goal was to find ways to use AI that will make life easier for ourselves or our users. It was rewarding because we went after a true, documented pain point in event planning and built something that fit naturally in the product (which was important to me because I complain about useless AI features all the time and I didn't want to be a hypocrite lol).

I don't think I can share too much more right now, but I'm proud of our team and am hoping we'll make it a reality soon so you can check it out live!

Who knows where this industry is headed? All I know is it feels amazing to get out of my usual design tools and actually prototype real iOS apps on my phone. I can build those wild interactions I used to just admire on awwwards.com. I don’t have to just imagine things anymore. I can make them.

If I wasn’t having so much fun, I’d probably be more worried about the future of design. But for now, I’m just messing around and loving it.

It's been a crazy start to the year… I realized I stopped posting 7 months ago. Here's some stuff I've done so far this year:

Started a new job at The Knot, working on guest list/RSVP tools

Went on a belated anniversary trip to Papagayo, Costa Rica with Cara

Listened to the Bon Iver album, SABLE, fABLE a billion times (I think From is my favorite)

Revamped my website - now with dark and light mode

Found and became obsessed with Freshfix - they deliver groceries straight from farms to your door if you live in Erie County

It’s hard to explain exactly why this browser works so well for my chaotic brain, but it just does. After giving it a shot as my main squeeze for a couple weeks I realized I had way fewer tabs open, way fewer rogue windows, and my pinned favorites worked SO well for things like email and my calendar.

I became a fan pretty quickly, getting a little too excited to nerd out about it when I would see a colleague using it while screensharing. Surprisingly, their release notes are the thing that transformed me into a super fan.

Release notes have never, ever, ever, come close to piquing my interest in the past. They usually feel like an afterthought, left purposely vague… “We fixed some bugs and improved performance.”

The Browser Company does it differently. They let use get a peek behind the curtain. Not only do they let us know what they’ve changed, but they even show internal Slack threads to let you see why they made decisions. They call the engineers and designers out by name for each feature. Not to mention, they are constantly pushing out meaningful updates that make an actual difference for users.

This transparency and active effort to humanize their company has me invested. It’s not just another soulless browser, it’s a group of passionate and talented people that are invested in making my life easier. More of this plz.

Lately I’ve been missing the early days of the internet. MySpace, AIM, super niche and passion driven forums. It could be nostalgia kicking in since I was just 13 when I was getting access to this amazing new connected world, but I think it’s something deeper. I think I’m missing a feeling of authenticity.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit all brought incredible innovation to the world, but over time I also think they changed our relationship with the internet and our motivation to be online. It started to turn from authentic connections and interests to dopamine hits and monetizing attention. In the same way that Walmart affected local Main Street shops, Reddit took on the majority of the inten.

MySpace hits in a different way for me because it really felt like an easy way for everyone to have their own little corner of the internet. Tom let us personalize our profiles to our hearts desire and even tricked us into learning a bit of code. It still had that magic of the early internet where anything felt possible.

It’s hard to imagine how many more of these platforms will come and go in my lifetime. I’m already the proud owner of 7+ profiles that are basically abandoned at this point because I never know what to post on which platform.

I mean, look at all of these profiles. They stress me out. I need to figure out what to post on each one? And they’re all sort of the same but sort of different? And there’s a chance everything I post on one might get lost forever if the company goes under?

This might end up being a failed experiment, but my website is my main profile now. I’m claiming my own weird little corner of the internet back.