In 2001, I was dating a girl long-distance. We'd emailed each other so often (and cellphones weren't really a thing yet) that I decided to make a web-based app

In 2001, I was dating a girl long-distance. We'd emailed each other so often (and cellphones weren't really a thing yet) that I decided to make a web-based app for messaging ourselves. It was a bespoke messaging system, essentially a forum that could only ever have exactly two users. The killer feature was the ability to see whether the other person had read the message you sent. Plus, the page would auto-refresh and put "NEW" in the page's title, so it was really easy to see whether there were new messages. (I seem to recall the web-based email clients of the day hadn't yet started doing this, so it felt like I had stumbled on some huge innovation.) My girlfriend loved it, and we became engaged later that year. Not that I'm necessarily implying causation here. Over the years, I rewrote the system from scratch to evolve with my web development skills. It began in Perl. About a year later, I rewrote it in PHP. Then, circa 2005, I rewrote it in Python/Django. It was one of the very first Django apps, as I did the conversion before Django was even open-sourced (I'm one of the original developers). The system is still humming along today, with its main purpose at this point being a fun archive of all of our correspondence from the early days.