Kado is a silly name. It doesn't really mean anything. I dreamt it up early on, before there was a product — I just needed a domain, a presence, something to build around.
The name means nothing If you're expecting an origin story where the name unlocks the philosophy, there isn't one. The name came first and empty. Everything else came after, and full.
What it actually is
What Kado actually is: a collection of parts. Itches I needed to scratch. Problems I couldn't solve with other apps, so I built the piece that solved them and kept going until the pieces added up to something.
Built for yourself first
I was reading about the philosophy behind Ruby on Rails recently — built for yourself first, and built around a point of view strong enough that a like-minded group can get behind it. Not everyone. That's the part people skip past. If a product tries to agree with everyone, it ends up standing for nothing, and the people who'd have loved it never find a reason to notice it.
The opinions are the point
That's exactly what happened here, just without the framing to explain it at the time. I didn't sit down to design a task manager for a market. I sat down annoyed at my own list of things to do, and I built the tool I wanted to use. The opinions in Kado (the planning window, the way overdue gets surfaced instead of forced, doing over organising) aren't compromises I'm apologising for. They're the actual point. They're why it works for the people it works for, and why it won't be for everyone, and I've made peace with that trade. They're also, mostly, the work of one person building across every discipline at once, not a team's compromise by committee.
Where the parts all mean something
So that's the series this blog is really about: not feature announcements, but the reasoning behind each part of the app: where it came from, what itch it scratched, why it looks the way it does instead of the more obvious way. Starting with the name that means nothing, and ending, hopefully, with a product whose parts all mean something.