As a student, you probably don’t need to explore every feature of your school’s digital platform at 7:15 in the morning. You need to know whether your first lesson is happening and which room you’re supposed to be in. Preferably before you leave the house.
That is the starting point of a project by Markus Haack (https://markus-haack.com/bessere-schule/) that caught my attention. His daughter’s school uses a platform called beste.schule for timetables, grades, announcements and various other things. The information she needs is there, but the app serves teachers, administrators, parents and students – all at the same time. You can imagine how many menus and options that involves. Way too much for his daughter at 7 in the morning.
So he built a different interface. One that puts students first and makes their everyday questions easier to answer. His daughter uses it daily and has shared it with some friends. According to Haack, the audience may be somewhere between one and three students a day, plus himself for testing.
Small can be enough
I like the idea that software can be worth building even when its entire intended audience fits around the kitchen table. We often talk about software in terms of numbers. How many users does it have? How quickly is it growing? Could it become a business? Those are reasonable questions if you’re running a software company. But if you’re building something for yourself or your family, you can measure its value much more directly: Does it help? Does someone actually use it? Does it make an annoying task a little easier?
That feels familiar. I have a daily job, and Just Me is one of my side projects. I also build tools for my journalism and writing, usually because there is something specific I want to do. Search through my own articles. Follow sources across different languages. Gather material that might otherwise disappear into a growing pile of bookmarks.
These projects begin with something in my own working day. Sometimes the result becomes useful enough to keep using. Sometimes I already suspect that I won’t use it very often, but I want to see whether I can get it working. There is value in that experiment too. I learn something, understand a problem better, or discover an approach I can use elsewhere.
Haack’s project has a particularly clear measure of success: his daughter opens it every day. For an app built to help her, that seems like a perfectly sensible result.
A different window onto the same information
Another thing I like about this example is that Haack didn’t build an entire school management system. The school continues to use its existing platform. His app provides a different window onto the information already stored there.
That distinction matters. A teacher and a student may need access to the same system, but they approach it with different questions. The teacher has administrative work to do. The student wants to check a room change or find out what homework is coming up. Putting every function into a single interface inevitably means some people spend time navigating around things they don’t need.
A personal tool can make different choices. It can give one question most of the screen. It can leave out entire categories of features. It can show next week’s timetable on a Saturday because that is more useful than the week that has just ended.
Those are small decisions, but they are the sort of decisions that make software fit someone’s routine. And they become easier to make when you know the person using it.
I recognise that in my own experiments. A tool built around how I work can be fairly simple because it doesn’t have to accommodate every possible workflow. I know where my files are, what sources I want to follow and what I need the output to look like. That gives me a useful starting point.
AI helps, but access makes it possible
Haack says he built the first version with Claude Code in two hours. That is an interesting part of the story, particularly given my own experiments with AI and tools for journalism. It is becoming easier to turn a specific idea into something you can actually try.
But another detail deserves attention: beste.schule has a documented API and encourages people to build tools around it. Without that access, the project would have been much harder, perhaps impractical. An AI coding tool can help create an interface, but that interface still needs a way to reach the information it is supposed to show. The API provides that connection.
This is where the story becomes bigger than one school app. If services provide documented ways to access our information, we have more room to choose how we use them. We can keep the underlying service while changing the part we interact with. We can build a simpler view, connect it to another tool or adapt it to a particular need.
That connects closely to why I like open formats and keeping my files somewhere I control. I want room to change tools as my needs change. An accessible API offers a related kind of freedom: the possibility of using the same information through a different application.
Someone still has to look after it
Of course, building a personal app doesn’t make maintenance disappear. Haack points out that changes to the underlying API could break his application. There are also limitations in what it can display, and some calculated information has to be clearly labelled as an estimate. Those details belong in the story too. Getting a first version working is one step. Keeping it useful is another. I have enough experiments of my own to recognise that difference.
Still, I find this a very appealing direction for personal computing. A parent sees a small problem, builds something around it, and a child finds it useful enough to use every day. The existing platform provides the data, and the new interface makes that data easier to use.
Perhaps more of our everyday software could work like that. Small tools, made for specific people and specific tasks, with enough access to the underlying information to be useful. And if one of them saves a teenager from walking to the wrong classroom before the first lesson, that sounds like a good morning’s work to me.