Franz turns ten this year. The actual anniversary was in March, but Franz 6 felt like the bigger marker, so I am writing this now, with the release.

This is the story of how a weekend prototype turned into a decade of stubborn work, what I almost did and decided not to, and why I think Franz 6 is the version that ripened the longest.

A weekend in 2016

I was freelancing for a handful of companies and running communities on the side. The Vienna Gamedev meetup. Several Slack groups. Discord servers, customer chats, founder DMs scattered across half a dozen apps. My communication had become a full time job next to the work that actually paid the bills.

One weekend I had no client work. I sat down with a vague idea of "what if I just had one window for all of this" and started experimenting with Electron. By Sunday evening I had a prototype that was rough, ugly, and obviously useful.…