A Journal Built to Be Handed Down

I wanted to write more, journal-style. I’d already been experimenting with building my own apps using Lovable instead of paying for or settling on an existing product, since building it myself meant it could be exactly customized to what I wanted.

The real driver was our daughters. My wife and I journaled daily on paper for our first, and we were expecting our second. I wanted a digital version of that, voice notes included, that could eventually be exported and handed to her when she’s old enough to understand it.

That’s why Leaflet works the way it does. Every user gets private notebooks by default, and any notebook can be shared with specific other people, which is how our daughter’s notebook works: just my wife and me, both writing into it. Beyond that, the core requirements were voice recording, creating a post by sending a WhatsApp message, and support for multiple separate notebooks. Export matters too, so the content stays with the family rather than being locked into someone else’s server.

It’s free, and I use it daily. It keeps evolving based on how I actually use it. More on how family shapes what I build is on the Thoughts page.

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