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. It was the first thing I had built in a long time that I genuinely wanted to keep using myself.…