Niche-Knack Dev Journal

She Called It Nerdy. So I Ran With It.

Wed, 14 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

I built Pocket Nerd because I needed a quick way to enter transactions and keep my wife, Andrea, on the same page with me about our money.

How much do we have? What have we spent? What does that mean for what’s coming up?

Those were the questions I wanted us both to be able to answer. I wanted a shared picture of where we were and what our future looked like, with a simple way to keep that picture current.

I’ll admit it, I’m a numbers nerd. I enjoy accounting and keeping track of financial accounts, and I can get pretty deep into that stuff. That’s the recipe for over-engineering.

An app for Andrea and me needed to be simple, and it needed to be something we would both actually use.

I knew Andrea wouldn’t want to use it if entering something was more involved than opening the app and typing a quick number. That gave me a pretty clear goal: make that part as quick and easy as I possibly could.

It’s a useful question when you’re building something for yourself and another person: how much work are you asking them to do just to keep the information current? Every extra step is something you’re asking someone to bother with, every time.

As a joke, Andrea brought up that it is kind of nerdy, like pulling a calculator out every time you make a purchase. (To be fair, she suggested the name Pocket Nerd, and it seemed pretty fitting.)

So I decided to run with it.

That’s where the fun elements came from. The practical need came first, and the personality grew around it. If I was already making a nerdy little money app, I might as well enjoy myself along the way.

The money side of it is still serious. Knowing where we stand, understanding what we’ve spent, and being able to look ahead together were the reasons I started building it. The playful parts should make it more pleasant to use while keeping that quick entry quick.

That’s the origin of Pocket Nerd. A number I needed to enter, a person I wanted to keep in the loop, and an observation from my wife that I probably took a little too far.

I tend to grab on to things and run with them.

How do you keep everyone in your household on the same page about spending? What makes your current approach easy to stick with, and where does it get in the way? If you could change one thing about the tools you use, what would it be?

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A Good Line Is Worth Waiting For

Mon, 12 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

One of my favorite song lyrics is rather fitting considering the season:

“Little old lady got mutilated late last night.”

It’s from Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves of London,” and I wait for it every time the song plays. The same way dads from my generation wait for the drum break in “In the Air Tonight,” ready to do their part on air drums. Apparently, this is my version of that.

Not only is it alliteration, which I love, but it manages to slip that hidden “late” in “mutilated” into the march of l’s. Then comes “late last night,” and the whole thing keeps moving, exquisitely reinforcing the song’s established rhythm.

I also enjoy a good pun, so my taste is suspect. But hear me out.

It’s a gruesome little sentence that is an absolute pleasure to say. I know exactly what’s coming, and knowing doesn’t spoil it. The anticipation is part of why I enjoy it. That’s quite a lot for one line to accomplish.

Looking back through my journals, this fascination with how words sound keeps showing up alongside my own attempts at poetry. I’ve written about Lana Del Rey’s phrasing and uneven meter, about plain language and near rhyme, and about revising a line until it sounds right. Sometimes the interesting thing is where the emphasis falls. Sometimes it’s the way one word seems to invite the next.

I even have a poetry checklist: rhythm, rhyme, assonance, alliteration, verbs, line breaks. Start with the plain idea, then work on how it sounds. Of course, having a checklist doesn’t mean I consistently produce good poetry. It does give me things to play with.

That’s the kind of exploration I want Euphonics to help with. I’m interested in understanding why a line works, and in what happens when we start paying closer attention to the language in our own writing. How much do we find by ear? How much comes from knowing what to look for? When does working on a line make it better, and when have we fiddled with it enough?

In the spirit of putting my own questionable taste on display, here’s one of my little attempts, “Haiku to a Dead Spring Goose”:

Puffed-up gander guides
new, defiant feet through streets
too proud to be moved.

So, poets and musicians: what’s your favorite lyric of all time? Which line do you wait for, and what is it about that line that gets you?

And how do you find the rhythm in your own words? Do you start with something you need to say, a melody, or a phrase that simply feels good in your mouth? I’d genuinely like to hear how you do it.

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Hello, I'm Jonathan

Sat, 10 Oct 2026 12:00:00 GMT

Hi, I’m Jonathan Batteas, and I make the apps at Niche-Knack.

For about eleven years I have worked as a software engineer at the University of Dayton Research Institute. Most of that time I have spent as a contractor at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, supporting the Air Force Research Laboratory across several directorates: RH, RY, RQ, and now RA, the Air Warfare Directorate. My work there is research in mission autonomy architecture: how autonomous systems are structured, how they make decisions, and how the pieces fit together.

What changed last December

Last December I started experimenting, on my own time, with agentic software workflows. Vibe coding, if you like. I expected a novelty. What I found genuinely blew me away.

Here is how I have come to think about it. The real power of a large language model is not in what it can “do.” My LLM cannot do anything I could not do myself. What it changes is the interface. The computer has always been able to do these things, but getting there meant knowing a specialized set of instructions for each one. Now there is a natural language interface sitting on top of those same systems. The computer we have always had just got easier to talk to.

I took that opportunity to write the software I have wanted in my own life for a long time. Then I realized other people might want it too.

Niche by design

These tools are not for everyone. They are niche. That is the point, and it is in the name.

They are also vibe coded, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But vibe coded does not mean careless. Each of these apps is carefully and lovingly crafted, and most of them are complex systems built by someone who understands the problems underneath and looks for ways around them.

My background shapes how I build. The UI and UX instincts come from my human factors years at RH. The systems modeling and systems thinking come from aerospace. So I take the time to get the details right:

Whether to load an entire audio file into memory for fast access, or use multiple ring buffers so you can scrub and decode a recording up to ten hours long without waiting.
How models hand off as a stream progresses, so a low-powered device gets just enough look-ahead while it scans.
Whether unlimited undo and redo belongs in a database or an edit decision list.
Whether a text box should change shape when it loses focus. If it should, it does.

Those are the kinds of decisions I weigh when working on these apps.

Make them better with me

I want these tools in the hands of people who will actually use them, and I want to hear what you think once you do. This journal is where I will share the work: the decisions, the dead ends, and the things that turned out better than expected.

If you want to try an app, the apps page is the place to start.

If something is not working the way you expect, support is right here. Support is me, not a call center somewhere. When you write in, you get me, personally, and I will get back to you as quickly as I can. I do have to sleep sometime.

Either way, I would like to work with you to make these better.

Thanks for reading.

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