Why "Almagesta": a hackathon, a 2nd-century astronomer, and a name too good to waste
A few years ago a colleague came to me with a request: help me shape a product idea, we want to pitch it at a hackathon. I'm a product manager. This is my favorite part of the job, taking a foggy "what if" and turning it into something you can put on a slide without blushing.
The idea was a course platform for coaches and consultants. It needed a name. I found one in the second century.
The astronomer
Ptolemy's Almagest was THE reference book of the sky for over a thousand years. A complete map of the cosmos as people knew it: Earth in the center, everything else moving around it in careful, deliberate orbits.
The model was wrong. Famously wrong. And still I love it.
Your world really does revolve around you. Your goals, your habits, your people, your mornings. You are the fixed point from which everything else is observed.
Not a selfish idea. A practical one. Copernicus was right about the planets, but Ptolemy was right about people.
The drawer
We won the hackathon. I still remember the feeling.
Then reality did its thing. No investment showed up, everyone went back to their day jobs, and the idea moved into the drawer where winning pitches go to sleep.
The name refused to go with it.
The R&D team I never had
I spent years building products for other people. I knew what to build and why, I knew how to talk to users, I knew how to say no to feature requests (a criminally underrated skill). What I never had was my own engineering team.
Then AI stopped being a headline and became a coworker. I watched the cost of building software fall through the floor. At some point the thought arrived and refused to leave: I now have an R&D department. It has read every changelog ever written, it works at 2 a.m., and it never asks for a raise. It does need supervision, code review, and someone who knows exactly what to build and why.
That someone is me. Nice to meet you.
Small planets
The old idea was one big platform. The new Almagesta is the opposite: small planets. Focused tools, each doing one job properly, each in its own orbit. No bloat. No subscription you discover on your bank statement a year later. No dark patterns begging you to come back.
Software that respects the person at the center of the map.
The first planet is Pingo, a reminder app born from one very specific personal frustration involving a photography exercise and an empty app store. That story gets its own post, it's next.
Welcome to Almagesta. Let's light up the sky.