True Story: The movie Clueless is the reason I became a software engineer. It's a story 24 years in the making. I was in middle school when the film came out and I was absolutely infatuated with the touchscreen computer program the main character uses to pick out her clothes in the opening credits. I begged my dad to build it for me. He said no, but he offered to help me learn to code so I could build it myself.
Well, as you might imagine, building a touchscreen UI with complex clothes matching algorithm is a lofty goal for your first coding project. Plus photographing every piece of clothing I owned was a daunting task. I got about as far as Hello World before my 13-year-old brain got distracted with... whatever my 13-year-old brain was getting distracted with back then. I learned HTML, built myself a website with probably way too many animated banners and never returned to the project.
Until 2015.
I had finally discovered capsule wardrobes, but was still struggling with building outfits and still hated the process of deciding what to wear. Eventually, I tried throwing money at it by hiring a stylist to take me shopping and teach me how to put looks together. I came out of it with a look-book filled raw images of all my outfits.
And then it hit me... I could finally build my app!
So I used a project management tool called Coda to build myself a fully automated virtual closet database with styling tools, and analytics dashboards.
I've been using my closet app for the past 2 years and it's only gotten MORE valuable as I've continued to pare down my clothes as we travel the globe. Metrics like "which shirts do I wear the most" or "which pieces are part of the most outfits" or "what is the current price-per-wear of these shoes" are crazy helpful for making data-driven decisions when re-doing my capsules each season.
Being smart with clothes is crucial for me because no matter how minimalist I strive to be, or how nomadic we are, I will always love fashion too much to compromise. as if :)
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