Build Your Alpaca
We're all building a herd.
An alpaca is something you love and care for. A business, an app, a cause, a job. Anything that can be built, nurtured, and loved.
We are all building a herd. Yours might be a single animal you tend for thirty years, or a dozen kept in a loose and noisy field. The size is not the point, and neither is anyone else's herd. Build yours as big or as small as you like, and look after what is in it.
Build Your Alpaca is where Chris Thompson keeps his. It is a small software workshop, home to the tools he builds for his own life and his own small businesses, once they are working well enough to keep.
Nothing here is a startup. These are personal tools, built slowly, used daily.
What lives here
The Assistant Uses Google data
A private assistant that helps its owner stay on top of his own email and calendar.
LifeOS
A plain-text knowledge base and daily journal that compiles notes, sources and decisions into something searchable.
Everything else
Small utilities that outgrow a scratch folder and need somewhere to live.
About the Assistant
The Assistant is the one tool here that connects to a Google Account, so it is worth being specific about what it does.
The Assistant is a private, single-user program. It runs on hardware owned and operated by Chris Thompson, and it connects only to his own Google Account, with his permission, granted through Google's standard consent screen.
With that permission it:
- reads Gmail messages so it can summarize what actually needs a reply
- labels, archives and moves mail to the trash while tidying up an inbox
- finds and files receipts and attachments
- sends and replies to mail, only after the owner approves the exact message
- reads Google Calendar to spot conflicts and surface what is coming up
- creates and updates calendar events so appointments land on the right calendar
It is not offered as a service to anyone else, it has no accounts, no sign-up, and no users other than its owner. It never sends anyone's data anywhere except back to Google's own APIs on its owner's behalf.
How that data is handled is written out in full in the privacy policy.