12 Apps in 12 Months – a Review

Late 2024, I decided that I was going to provide more focus for my development in 2025, and to that end, I would attempt one new project a month, and so 12 apps in 12 months was born.

What did I do?

I very much stuck to my knitting with these projects as every one of them was written in a language that I know very well: PHP. Ten out of the 12 also used a third-party API to source data that was then used as the basis of the project.

Here’s a full list of all the projects completed in 2025 along with a link to more information about each:

• January: jolpica2Ergast
• February: WordPress Simple Stats
• March: Plex What to Watch Next
• April: Evernote Rules
• May: Family History searches
• June: bookISBN2Task
• July: Family Remembers
• August: Discogs Cleanup
• September: Home Assistant – Bus Stop Times
• October: bookshelf – a reading list manager
• November: WordPress to Day One
• December: Foursquare to Day One

What did I learn?

The point of this exercise was to ensure that I expanded my horizons a little and stretched myself when it came to coding. I was already pretty proficient with PHP but there were some CSS and JS requirements that challenged me along the way.

One thing that I found helped when I was struggling to get things exactly as I wanted them was AI. None of the projects were exclusively written by AI, as that would have defeated the point, but there were times when I needed help, particularly to get things lining up correctly on screen, where I’d turn to AI, mainly ChatGPT, for support. Another area was in writing functions to carry out very specific functionality or perfecting my Regex.

AI has been a scary addition to my coding arsenal. Sometimes the autocompleted on VS Code would propose exactly the line that I needed, and other times something that made no sense at all. However, for quick function and “how the hell do you do this?” type questions it has been a revelation.

Something slightly more mundane was my use of SQLite, something that I was aware of but had neve actually used before. As I have written elsewhere I had been either sotring data in MySQL or in flat files and living with the compromises of each. SQLite has been a great middle ground.

What problems did I encounter?

Limiting the amount of time I had for each project meant that they had to be small, single-purpose apps, rather than some grand platform and at times that felt a bit constraining. Time became even more of an issue when some third party piece of software I was relying on wasn’t working.

This actually happened on three different projects: Evernote Rules, WordPress to Day One and Foursquare to Day One. In each case I had to contact the respective support in order to get their API and/or CLI’s to work. This was frustrating and time consuming. It led me to having to switch the order of projects in order to make some progress while I waited.

The other issue I discovered was that I suffer from a real lack of imagination and struggled to come up with enough ideas for 12 decent projects.

Thoughts for the future?

Would I do it again? No. I would rather concentrate on larger projects and do them properly than compromise a project through lack of time. However, you could consider these as just MVPs for the real thing and with that in mind I have decided that I am going to revisit bookshelf – a reading list manager. One of the issues I faced was pleasing all the users of the app and how it looked and worked on mobile and desktop. Going back will allow me to sort those issues without the pressure of a deadline.

I also want to do something new in 2026 and have decided on converting the WDiL project to a mobile app. I clearly cannot do that in PHP (unfortunately) so that will require selecting and learning a new language which I will begin shortly. Time will tell how well that works out but check back on the blog to find out.