The Problem I Couldn't Stop Thinking About
I've always been fascinated by family history — the idea that the lives of people you love exist as a sequence of moments, decisions, and chapters that overlap and build on each other. But every tool I found for documenting those lives felt wrong. Genealogy apps were clinical — they wanted dates and names, not stories. Photo apps were great for individual moments but couldn't show you the shape of a life. Timelines existed, but they were flat and lifeless.
What I kept imagining was something more like looking at a life from above. A bird's-eye view that let you see everything at once — the quiet years and the pivotal ones, the chapters that defined someone, the weeks that changed everything.
I'm a UX/UI designer by trade, and I kept sketching the same thing over and over: a grid. A grid of weeks.
A human life, statistically, is about 4,000 weeks. What if you could see all of them? What if each one could hold color, meaning, memory?
The Spark: Life in Weeks
The "life in weeks" concept isn't new — Tim Urban at Wait But Why popularized a version of it. But every implementation I'd seen treated it as a reminder of mortality, a productivity shock. That wasn't what I wanted.
I wanted it to be a record. A living document. Something your grandmother could fill in and your grandchildren could read.
The core concept crystallized around three layers:
- Chapters — the named phases of a life ("The Factory Years," "Finding My Voice," "The Long Goodbye") — color-coded arcs that span from a few months to a few decades
- Milestones — specific, pinned moments in time: births, marriages, losses, breakthroughs
- Memories — written reflections, the kind of thing you'd write in a private diary or share in a candid interview
Three layers. One grid. A whole life.
📸 [Insert screenshot: the Historia weekly grid with chapter colors layered across it]
From Sketch to Code
I'm comfortable with HTML and CSS, but building a full application was new territory. I'd experimented with v0.dev for early prototyping, which was invaluable for stress-testing the visual concept quickly. Could the grid actually hold the weight of a real life without becoming visual noise? Would the color-coded chapters be intuitive or confusing?
Those early prototypes answered a lot of questions — and raised new ones. When I hit the ceiling of what rapid prototyping tools could handle, I made the jump to building properly: Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and Supabase for the backend.
That transition marked a real inflection point. Moving from "demo" to "product."
📸 [Insert screenshot: early v0 prototype vs. current UI side-by-side]
The design system came together around a palette that felt appropriate for something dealing with memory and legacy: sage green, warm grays, navy, amber accents. Serif type (Newsreader) for the storytelling moments, clean sans-serif (Geist) for the UI. It needed to feel like it belonged in a library, not a productivity app.
The Detail That Changed Everything
Midway through development, I made a decision that changed the direction of the entire product.
I added public profiles of notable figures.
The idea was simple: to demonstrate what Historia could hold, I'd build out profiles of historical figures using the same structure. Joan Rivers. Freddie Mercury. Eleanor Roosevelt. Jane Goodall.
But to do it right, I couldn't just pull from Wikipedia. I wrote a content generation system with a specific philosophy: every profile had to be written in the first person voice of the subject, drawing from their actual letters, journals, interviews, and autobiographical writings. Not a biography — a self-portrait.
That constraint turned out to be the heart of the product. When you read Eleanor Roosevelt's memories written in her voice, describing the moment she found her own sense of purpose, it's different from reading about her. It's intimate in a way that biographical data never is.
📸 [Insert screenshot: a public profile view — e.g., Eleanor Roosevelt or Freddie Mercury — showing the grid and a memory entry]
This also revealed something important about what Historia is really for. It's not about tracking productivity or visualizing mortality. It's about narrative. The shape of a life is a story, and stories deserve to be told well.
The AI Life Builder
One of the most challenging — and most exciting — features I built is the AI Life Builder.
The problem it solves is simple: most people don't want to stare at a blank grid and start tagging weeks. That's an intimidating interface for something as personal as your own life. But people do want to tell their story — they just want to talk it out, not structure it from scratch.
The AI Life Builder lets you narrate casually. You talk about your life the way you'd talk about it to a friend. The system listens, asks follow-up questions, and begins generating chapters, milestones, and memories in the Historia format from your natural language.
It's the difference between "fill in this form" and "tell me about yourself."
📸 [Insert screenshot: AI Life Builder interface]
Where It Lives Today
Historia is approaching launch. The core features are working:
- The weekly life grid — responsive, interactive, layered with chapters, milestones, and memories
- User authentication and profiles — personal documentation, private by default
- Public figure profiles — a growing library of notable lives to explore and be inspired by
- AI Life Builder — conversational profile generation from natural narrative
- Social layer — following other users, discovering public profiles
- Mobile optimization — because life happens away from desks
The design has gone through significant polish passes — dashboard redesign, new logo, refined visual identity. It's starting to feel like a real thing.
📸 [Insert screenshot: the main dashboard view]
What I Learned Building It
Feature descriptions work better than implementation specs when working with AI tools. My workflow evolved into using Claude for product strategy and planning, and Claude Code for implementation. The key was learning to describe what I wanted a feature to feel like rather than how to build it.
The content problem is as hard as the engineering problem. Getting the public profiles right — authentic voice, real primary sources, honest about struggles and failures — took as much care as any technical decision.
Personal motivation is a better compass than market research. Every decision I've second-guessed, I second-guessed because I drifted away from the original problem: I have a hard drive full of family history and no good way to make sense of it. Every decision I'm proud of came from asking: does this help with that?
What's Next
The near-term roadmap is focused on launch — but I'm already thinking past it.
The feature I'm most excited to build is multi-family support: the ability to build out a family tree where individual lives connect to each other. Imagine seeing your grandmother's chapter of "Raising Children" overlap visually with your mother's chapter of "Growing Up." The same weeks. Different grids. The same story.
I'm also exploring historical context layers — connecting personal events to the broader world happening around them. The week someone was born, annotated with what was happening in the world that week. A life in context.
And eventually, I want Historia to handle the hard drive problem properly. Import tools. Media organization. A way to attach the 30,000 photos to the weeks they actually belong to.
Why It Matters to Me
I don't think most people realize how much of their family history they're carrying in their heads — and how quickly it disappears. The stories your parents tell you. The context your grandparents never got to share. The version of events that died with someone.
Historia won't fix that. No software can. But it might make it a little easier for the people who want to document those lives to actually do it. To sit down and name the chapters. To write the memories that only they remember.
That's worth building.
Historia is in development and approaching launch. If you're interested in early access or want to follow along, reach out.
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