Built a Custom Career Compass App for My Sister's Birthday

My sister's birthday was last week, so I built her a custom app called Career Compass. She's constantly figuring out her next career move - which course to take, which direction to go - and we have endless conversations about it. She already has a PhD, but she's a lifelong learner (runs in the family, I think).

Here's where it gets exhausting: whenever she decides on a direction, I'm the one rewriting her CV, drafting cover letters, and formatting journal articles for publication. So I thought, why not build an app that does it all for her?

What I built:

Course Checker - Evaluates whether a course aligns with her stated career goals from onboarding
Degree Explorer - Reviews new directions against what she said she wanted to achieve
CV Updater - Tailors resumes to specific jobs
Cover Letter Generator - Creates customized cover letters
Journal Article Formatter - Formats articles for publication
Mindless Moments - Drawing tool (for her or her three kids) that saves and emails creations

The Course Checker and Degree Explorer are particularly useful because they reference her onboarding answers and help her evaluate whether new opportunities actually align with what she wants for her life right now. It's like having accountability built in.

I was genuinely excited about this. It was my first time working with encryption on the backend, so it's actually pretty secure. I'm proud of it.

Her reaction? Not impressed. She felt like I was trying to remove myself from the equation (guilty as charged). Her exact response: "I'm still gonna call you anyway."

So after all that work to free up my time, she plans to ignore it completely. We'll see what happens when I start saying no. It's a boundaries thing at this point.

The kicker? When I mentioned I could sell this to other people, she got defensive: "No, it's mine!" But she doesn't plan on using it.

That's little sisters for you.

Has anyone else built something for family only to have them completely ignore it?

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