Personal Software

What could you create if you had 30 minutes to plan and 4 hours to build? Nicole, Ryan, Israa, Hosna, Joe, and Mark built apps to help us reconnect with the world outside the screen. Sponsored by Apollo and featuring Michael as our advisor.

The Challenge

As developers, we can often identify lots of areas in our own lives that could be improved by a custom app — if only we had the time to build them. These days, AI coding workflows and tools like MCP servers make it much more feasible to build custom software for personal use only, so we’re challenging you to do exactly that.

Wish you had an app that would turn your wifi off at 8pm so you’d actually get to bed on time? What about a chore schedule that’s exactly tailored to your family situation? Maybe a calendar that tracks only new book releases that are part of series you’re in the middle of reading.

Make it practical; make it silly; whatever you do, make it personally valuable to you.

The Tool: Postman

Your app must use Postman as part of the build.

Postman is the most popular tool out there for working with APIs. In this challenge, you’ll want to look into their suite of tools for designing and building MCP servers and agentic workflows:

• MCP Servers — tons of available MCP servers that you can use
• Generate an MCP Server — Postman has tools that allow you to generate your own MCP server from any public API
• Postman AI Agent Builder — tools including LLM prompt testing, agent workflow designer, and tool generation
• The Public API Network — this is a huge collection of public APIs that you can use as part of your build