Pulse – Now Free and Open-Source

Join me in taking the development to the next level.

A few weeks ago I introduced my iOS App Pulse – Your Micro Journal. Since then I shipped many new features and reflected on my learning journey with AI – and sometimes deliberately without it.

My original idea for keeping Pulse proprietary was to “use money as neutral indicator of value” as Cal Newport quoted the entrepreneur Derek Sivers famously in his book “So Good They Can’t Ignore You.” Likes and approval are easy to give; paying is much harder. In that sense, money signals real value.

I want to sincerely thank everyone who supported Pulse by paying for it. Whether you valued the app itself or the effort behind it, your support meant a lot and showed me that Pulse does create value.

At the same time, I have to acknowledge that there is not as much value and traction as I had hoped or wished. That, too, is valuable feedback, but begs the question what to do with it.

I could have doubled down on features and marketing. But because Pulse has always been, in large part, a way for me to learn iOS development and return to software engineering, I chose a different path:

As of today, Pulse is open-source and free.

Everyone is welcome to use it at no cost – and, more importantly, to join me in building it. I hope this is the next step in taking both the app and my learning journey to a new level. And it also gives me the opportunity to give something back to the open-source community that I admired since my early days working with computers.

Check out the project on Github, star it, fork it, add an issue, start a discussion. I would be delighted to hear from you:

PS. Please forward this to developers who might be interested in contributing.