The cat in the app
Who is Mochi?
The black-and-white cat you keep meeting in the app is a real cat. He lives with us, he is called Mochi, and he has an opinion about most things.
He came from the animal shelter
He was already grown when we met, already unimpressed, and had been at the shelter long enough that nobody expected him to leave that day. He came home, walked the whole flat once without hurrying, and has behaved ever since as though the lease were in his name.
The app was his idea
He will tell you so himself. I was copying the same shopping list onto the same scrap of paper for the fourth week running, and he sat on it. That is how a product decision gets made in this house: something is in the way often enough, and a cat sits on it. Daitoo is a handful of lines you tick off — which is exactly as much app as he thinks anybody needs.
He insisted on a cut
Not for himself. For the ones still waiting where he was waiting. So at least five percent of what Daitoo earns goes to animal welfare, once a year, in December. That part was not up for discussion.
What is donated, and where it goesHe supervises the work
His post is the warm half of the desk, between the keyboard and the screen, from where a line of code can be reviewed by laying a paw across it. He is against long functions and in favour of the laptop staying open. Most of this app was written with a cat somewhere on the desk, and it is the better for it — nothing finishes a thought like knowing you are about to lose the keyboard.
There is one thing he holds against me
I forget to feed him. Not often, and never for long, but often enough that he has developed a look for it — the one in the picture at the top of this page, with the empty bowl painted in beside him as evidence. Look at the list on the front page of this site and you will find “Feed the cat” on it. That is not a joke at my expense. It is a reminder, and it works.
You have already met him
Inside the app he is drawn rather than photographed: stretching across a list with nothing on it, asleep once every item is ticked off, or waving from the overview before you have made your first list. And he may well turn up somewhere else.