Why I built this

It was the middle of the night and the thermometer said 39.6.

My wife was exhausted. She had been up with our son for nights in a row, so I told her to sleep, I would take care of it.

Then I stood there and realised I had no idea what he had been given. Which fever medicine, and when. I had been asleep. She had not had the energy to write it in our family group.

So I had to wake her up.

The whole point was to take this off her shoulders, and the first thing I did was wake her and ask her to remember. Half asleep, she told me what she thought she gave him. Neither of us was sure about the time.

That annoyed me more than I can explain. I am a practical person. My whole job is to make things run smoothly. And here I was, at night, unable to answer the simplest question about my own child.

That was June and July this year. It was the war here in the UAE, we were all working from home, and our little one was sick again and again. Fever, cough, infection, fever. For weeks.

Our family group with our nanny turned into a medicine log. "Temperature 38.6, given at 7:00." "Can be given at 5 am, six hours after the 11 pm dose." "Please NOT before 7:30." A schedule typed out at 9 pm for the whole night, one medicine at 9, the other at midnight, back to the first at 3. Messages at 3, 4 and 5 in the morning. And in between: "How's his temperature?" "What was his fever?" "Thank God."

It worked, mostly. Until someone was too tired to type. Then the chain broke, and the only way to fix it was to wake someone up.

One evening I stopped being irritated and sat down to fix it. I had been learning to build with AI whenever I had time, so I opened Claude and built a small app just for us. Four or five hours. One place where my wife, our nanny and I could see what was given, by whom and when, and every temperature.

On 25 July I sent it to the family: "We now have one shared app for his medicines. Whatever one of us marks as given, everyone sees instantly. No more double doses or 'did you give it?' messages."

I was ridiculously excited. You know that feeling when you solve a big problem at work and for a moment you feel like you invented the internet? That. And something bigger: I realised I could now bring my own ideas to life.

I kept going, in the evenings and on weekends, next to a day job I love. That family app became FamilyDose.

I built it so that no parent has to wake up the other one to ask, "what did you give him, and when?"