I’ve been working on MiniMoments for longer than I care to admit. It started as a simple idea. A photo app for kids so they can take pictures without creating chaos in their parents’ photo library. But like most of my hobby projects, it became this endless cycle of “just one more feature” and “maybe I should refactor this part first.”
Last week I published it.
Anyone who knows me knows I’m terrible at finishing things. I get obsessed with details that probably don’t matter. I’ll spend a weekend restructuring a database schema instead of just building the feature I was supposed to work on. I’ll read about testing patterns for three hours instead of actually writing tests.
MiniMoments was heading down that same path. I had notebooks full of ideas for features. The codebase was a graveyard of half-implemented experiments. Every time I sat down to work on it, I’d find something else that “should be fixed first.”
A few months ago I started using Claude Code. Not because I thought it would help me finish MiniMoments, honestly. I was just curious about coding with AI.
What I didn’t expect was how much it would change the way I work. The parts of development that used to drain my energy became much easier and more fun. Setting up a new component structure? Done in minutes instead of hours of contemplating the perfect architecture. Writing repetitive code and fixing details? No longer something I’d procrastinate on for days.
I started enjoying the process again. When you’re not dreading the boring parts, you actually want to sit down and code. When someone else handles the scaffolding, you get to focus on the interesting problems.
MiniMoments isn’t perfect. There are features I want to add. There’s code I know could be cleaner. But it works. It does what I set out to build. And most importantly, it’s out there.
I realized something while working on the final release. I was stuck in this pattern because I was trying to do everything myself, and I was doing the parts I didn’t enjoy first. Having Claude handle the tedious stuff meant I could work on what actually matters to the app.
Now that it’s launched, I’m working on features based on real usage. Not the perfect architecture that would make the codebase pristine.
You can check out MiniMoments on the App Store if you’re curious what finally came out of all those years of tinkering.