I built a PD tracker because AirTable was too slow

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 08:51:54 +0200

My first iOS app is live on the App Store: dialysisPal.

It’s a peritoneal dialysis tracker. Open it, enter UF, weight, blood pressure, pulse, done. Twice a day, seconds each time. Charts show the long-term trends, and one tap exports a PDF for your nephrologist. I built it because Airtable was too slow.

I started it in June last year with Claude Code. I’d never written a line of Swift; Python was all I knew. I had a mostly working version within a month. After that, things slowed down: three hospital stays, and a lot to learn about coding with LLMs. The app moved through several coding harnesses and models until it landed on GLM (4.7 through 5.2) and Pi Coding Agent.

Along the way: two abandoned redesigns, one failed complete rewrite, one successful refactor and lots of little distractions. LLM coding eats you alive if you are not careful.

So it hasn’t just been my first iOS app. It’s been my teacher for the last 13 months or so.

I’ve been using it myself for about a year and finally decided it was good enough for public consumption. It’s still not perfect, but perfect is the enemy of good.

So here it is:

App Store link · dialysepal.de

dialysePal on Alexander Kucera

I built a PD tracker because AirTable was too slow