From medicine to software

Hey, I’m Kofi. I used to be a doctor. Now I build software, which is a strange sentence to write, but it’s the honest one.

The thing I never got used to in medicine was how much of the outcome came down to something nobody could see. You’d get the diagnosis right, get the prescription right, explain it properly, and then the person would go home and, some days, just not take it. Not out of defiance. Out of Tuesday.

Every reminder app I tried on myself had the same flaw: nothing happens when you ignore it. A notification you can dismiss is a suggestion. A streak you can reset in private is a suggestion. The tablet gets skipped and the day continues exactly as if it hadn’t.

So Lockade does the one thing those apps won’t. Miss the slot, and the app you’d have reached for anyway stops opening. It’s a small, slightly annoying consequence that lands at the moment you’d otherwise scroll past the problem.

On not being the police

I want to be clear about the limits of this. Lockade is friction, not enforcement. You can spend an unlock. You can ask your buddy. You can delete the app. If you get all the way to scanning the box and still don’t take the medicine, no app was going to save that.

Adherence stays yours. My job is to make the wrong choice slightly inconvenient at the right moment, and then get out of the way.

On what stays private

I was a doctor before I was a developer, and I’m not going to build the thing where your medication list ends up on someone’s server. The names never reach our servers. Not to us, not to analytics, not to your buddy. Your schedule does sync, so that a lost phone doesn’t cost you it, but it goes up without the names: a dose amount and some slot times, and nothing that says what it’s for. Your buddy sees that a slot was missed. They never see what was in it.

That constraint shaped the whole architecture, and it’s the part I’d defend hardest if someone asked me to loosen it.

It’s just me

Solo project. I write the code, I ship the bugs, I read the emails. Slower than a team, but you’re talking to the person who can actually fix it. If something’s broken or wrong-headed, tell me: support@lockade.app.