Well, Sovernus is live.
Actually, that’s a bit misleading, we’ve been live for months. The first version went live on the app stores at the end of September, and I’ve just been procrastinating on sharing it with people. There’s a certain anxiety that one can have when building something from scratch and releasing it to the world that causes you to hesitate, wondering what people will think. They might tear down your precious creation with negative feedback, or wonder how it took you so long to build so little, or just plain not care.
The reality of an early-stage creation like this is that there are many, many paths that you can follow when an idea takes root in your mind. This one’s taken me all over the map, there’s a large number of unmerged git branches and build flags hiding half-finished features that I realized halfway through don’t quite fit what I want them to be, or weren’t quite as useful as I’d originally thought. Perhaps a portion of these will eventually find their way into the released app, because they can be pretty cool (the augmented reality stuff was especially fun to work on, even if it didn’t materialize into something useful…yet).
So without further ado, this is my announcement of our existence. The focus of the app has been on my own personal pain points; during Covid I had the idea to buy a house out in the country and become a “homesteader” (a decision that I would make again in a heartbeat), and it didn’t take very long to realize that owning your first home with a young family is a challenge even before you start factoring in the homesteading side. There were so many things I wish I had known about and many things that I was less-than-well disciplined on keeping track of, so as any software engineer would do I’ve tried to capture the things I’ve learned as code.
These pieces of code, which I’ve called “blueprints”, form the core of the Sovernus app. You can think of them as step-by-step guides to taking care of various aspects of your home: they tell you what to do, when to do it, how to do it, what to buy, etc. I’ve got about 20 of them so far with more in the works, and I’ve been steadily expanding both their quality and what they are capable of.
What I’m hoping for now from the community is feedback. I’m looking for some younger homeowners who are facing similar pains to share some of their experiences, so I can understand what is specific to me and what are problems that are more broadly experienced. If you’re interested in being a part of this, I’d love to hear from you. Thanks!