This is the start of a build-in-public series. No code yet. Just the why — because that's where everything starts.
I Call Myself an Indie Hacker. But Right Now I'm Sitting in a Lecture Hall.
My bio says "indie hacker swinging through the jungle." The reality is slightly less cinematic: I'm a computer engineering student, and lately my lectures have been covering Django.
Something clicked.
I'd been turning over a product idea in my head for a while — a privacy-first calendar, built for people who actually care about where their data lives. And suddenly I had a framework I was learning in depth, a real reason to go beyond the tutorial, and a project worth building.
So here we are.
The Problem
Google Calendar is the obvious choice for most people. It works, it's everywhere, it's free.
But free means your events, your routines, your life, are sitting on someone else's servers. For a lot of people that's a fine tradeoff. For me, it's not.
I wanted a calendar that:
- Keeps data local — self-hosted, no cloud you didn't choose
- Works without phoning home
- Can be owned completely by whoever runs it That app didn't exist in a form I was happy with. So I'm building it.
Why Django? Why Now?
Timing matters. I'm learning Django properly in university right now — not through a YouTube tutorial I'll abandon, but through structured coursework that's forcing me to understand it at the right depth. It felt wrong not to use that momentum.
Django also happens to be a genuinely good fit:
- Battle-tested for web apps with auth and data models
- HTMX + Alpine.js for a fast, interactive frontend without a full JS framework
- SQLite for self-hosting simplicity, PostgreSQL for the cloud version I'm not picking Django to be clever. I'm picking it because I'm learning it right now and it fits the problem.
What WeRemember Actually Is
We Remember (结绳记事 — literally "tying knots to remember") is a privacy-first, self-hostable calendar app.
- No trackers, no Google, data stays local — self-host it and it never leaves your machine
- AGPL licensed — if you fork it and run it as a service, you open-source it too
- Extensible by design — a plugin system is on the roadmap for the long term The target for now: privacy-conscious self-hosters and European users who live in GDPR culture and are willing to pay for privacy.
The repo is live at github.com/OranguStudio/we-remember. Follow along on X @OranguEngineer or here on dev.to. Day 1 drops when the foundation is solid.
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