So here we are, five weeks into this grand little project, and I’m finally getting around to creating the much-promised blog so folks can follow our progress.
By way of introduction, the idea for RememberOneAnother was conceived a few months ago while I was enjoying a burrito at Chipotle and a time of earnest reflection about what I am going to be when I grow up (at 37, I’m too old to be doing an Internet startup and too young to be having a mid-life crisis, but here I am). My approach of late has been to focus on those things that God has more or less uniquely qualified me to do in the world, and this is my short list:
- Building Web / database applications. This has been my day job for 13 years, so I ought to be some good at it by now.
- Organizing things.
(As an aside, I have had a desire for many years to build a Web app that makes it very easy to organize all sorts of lists. It is amazing to me how many companies use glorified lists to run their operations, yet have very poor management of them. You find important lists in Word docs and spreadsheets, but not often where they belong, which is in a database so many people can work with the items in the list at the same time. There’s a company yet to be born here, but that’s for another day.)
Now combine my technical skills with a desire to improve my own prayer life and you have RememberOneAnother. I’m forever misplacing things that I want to pray about such as prayer requests from friends and family. Trouble is, I have too many prayer lists: a list for our church divided among the days of the week, lists for our church small group and Bible study at work, and various missionary prayer letters. Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, if I could combine all these lists in a database and get an email once a day with all my items for that day?
And since Web applications are what I know how to write, I might as well share it with others, which leads to some other possibilities. When I send out a prayer request via email, as I often receive from church, it could have a link back to RememberOneAnother so that others can automatically “subscribe” and add it to their lists. And then they can get future updates for that request, too. And people who originate a request can be encouraged to see just how many people are praying for them, people they might not even know if they have chosen to share the request publicly. There’s more where this came from, but that should get us started. Click on The Mission page for more of what’s in store.
Now, how to find the time to create such a thing? Having a full-time job already and an already-overworked fruitful vine with five young olive plants (see Psalm 128), I do not have many hours each day left for “side projects.” So I put together my tax rebate and some spare change and hired a starving Physics major from nearby Covenant College for the summer.
We’re now five weeks in, and we’ve accomplished a great deal. Joben has been absorbing knowledge at a rapid pace and his brain is not yet full. We’re almost done with the sign-up process, and we’ve set up the hosting environment. Now we’re ready for full-speed ahead on the core prayer engine and Lord-willing, an end-of-summer launch. If you’re interested in the project, please join with us in prayer for wisdom, skill, and resources to complete it!
Your Web / database engineer in Christ’s service,
David
Filed under: Progress
