Built because the whiteboard kept failing.

I spent ten years building production systems for organisations that cannot afford things to go wrong. I know how to make software reliable. What I could not figure out, for an embarrassingly long time, was how to make my own family's week visible at a glance.

We tried everything. A whiteboard on the fridge that nobody updated after the first fortnight. A shared Google Calendar that worked fine for me, because I am the one who set it up, and was essentially invisible to everyone else. A couple of “family organiser” apps that looked as though they had been designed by a committee who had never actually lived with children. The information was always somewhere. It was never somewhere useful.

Kerfuff started as a weekend project. I wanted something that would sit on the old tablet in the kitchen and just show us the week. No login prompt. No notification badge. No dark pattern asking us to upgrade. Just the schedule, always current, on a screen we were already walking past twenty times a day. I built the wall display first, then the pairing system so my partner could connect it herself without asking me anything. Then the AI photo capture, because school letters are still mostly paper and that is not changing any time soon.

A year later it is a proper product. The principle has not changed from that first weekend: the family calendar should work for the whole family, not just the person technical enough to maintain it.