I built a website because I was annoyed

I love going to the cinema in Berlin. The city has an incredible scene — small independent theaters showing films in original language, retrospectives of obscure directors, double features that start at 11pm. But finding what’s playing on any given night is a nightmare. Each cinema has its own website, its own schedule format, its own way of listing showtimes. If you want to see what’s available tonight, you have to open fifteen tabs and mentally cross-reference them all. I did this for months. It was annoying.

So I built a website that does it for me. One page, all cinemas, all movies, filterable by date and neighborhood. It sounds simple — and honestly, it is. But that’s kind of the point. The best side projects aren’t the ambitious ones that try to change the world. They’re the small, irritating problems you solve for yourself because no one else will. You don’t need a business plan or a target market. You just need something that bothers you enough to fix it.

There’s a certain freedom in building for an audience of one. No user research, no roadmap debates, no compromises. Just: what do I want this to do? The answer is always clear because you’re the user. You know exactly when it’s good enough and when it’s not. You ship when it feels right, not when a deadline says so.

I’ve been using it for a while now. Sometimes I open it and realize I added a feature three months ago that I forgot about — and it’s still useful. That’s the strange reward of building your own tools: they become invisible, part of your routine, quietly making your life a little better.

If you’re in Berlin and tired of the tab-juggling ritual, maybe it’ll help you too: here