Hey, Thomas here! If this is our first time meeting, then Hi it’s great to meet you here!

This Summer we’re doing something that we’ve never done before. We’ve never organized an event around building apps and we’ve never never run a housing program before.

I am incredibly excited to make this happen together with you this Summer in San Francisco.

Regarding what you can build for the pre-SF project, the goal is NOT to make the next Instagram, Slack, Pinterest, Netflix, etc. The goal is to make something you love and it can be for just 3 people you’d like to make something for.

It should be a new project for you (new GitHub repo), but that could mean rewriting something you made years ago or taking an idea you’ve had in the back of your mind and bringing it to life. It can also mean coming up with something totally new with your friends. Make your app for you and have fun with it. It isn’t for us and it isn’t an assignment.

5 years ago, I made a recipe web app for my mom to be able to share her recipes with my brother who was moving out and wanted to learn how my mom makes such delicious food. It’s called MealPack & it works to this day (although a little slow, buggy, bad UX, etc).

I want to rebuild this app but make it more reliable and add in some features that I wish the app had (for example the ability to talk through a recipe and have it do the formatting for you rather than having to hand-type every part of it).

here’s a UI I put together recently. just an early concept rn, gotta just dig into code and start making it :)

a person who I met who helped staff Juice in Shanghai (Raisa) is helping draw some really assets for Meal Pack interface!

A big part of Neighborhood is good practice. Good practice means building something that’s at the edge of what you’re capable of making. It’s just a more advanced than things you’ve made before, but not so far from your current level that you cannot start to execute on it.

I encourage you to challenge yourself this month, make something that’s a bit of your comfort zone (maybe that’s a design style, a programming language/framework, some feature that you find interesting).