I built a software stack for my own wedding

I’m getting married, and somewhere in the planning my brain decided the correct response to a real-world problem was to open a code editor.

There’s a repo for the save-the-date site. A separate repo, a whole dashboard, for coordinating the venue: guests, vendors, all of it. And a standalone catering cost calculator, deployed to the actual internet, for one wedding. Mine.

A normal person does catering math in a spreadsheet and uses one of the eleven existing wedding-website services. I looked at all of that the way I look at Jira and Google Calendar and everything else I’ve quietly rebuilt, and decided I’d rather own the bootleg. The wedding’s gothic, at an old hotel that’s supposedly haunted. The software’s bespoke, at a startup that’s supposedly me.

No defense. Past a certain stress level, building a small private tool to manage the stress beats using the perfectly good tool that already exists. The save-the-dates went out. The marriage is not, as far as I know, blocked on a merge conflict.