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Sharing GiaPha-OS: An Open-Source Family Tree Application

English~2 min read
#open-source
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Sharing GiaPha-OS: An Open-Source Family Tree Application

During Lunar New Year cleaning, I came across my family's genealogy book. It was page after page of names and relationships. My first thought was, "This should be easy to turn into a web application." Just a basic record management system, a little bit of vibe coding, and it would be done.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

A family tree is far more complicated than a simple tree structure.

Real families have all kinds of relationships: first wives, second wives, remarriages, biological children who are later adopted by another family member, divorces, both lunar and solar birth/death dates, and many other edge cases.

Then there are permissions. Lock everything down and older family members struggle to use it. Make it too open and sensitive family information becomes visible to everyone.

The visualization turned out to be another surprisingly difficult problem. As the number of family members grows, the tree quickly becomes overwhelming-especially on mobile devices. The more information you try to display, the harder it becomes to keep the interface clean and usable.

Even after years of building software, I still find myself underestimating problems that look "small" at first glance. From a distance, this seemed like nothing more than a CRUD application. But once you dive into the details, countless edge cases appear, each requiring careful thought and much more development time than originally expected.

Originally, I built this project only for my own family. But after sharing a few screenshots on Threads, quite a few people asked if they could use it for their own families as well.

So I decided to open-source the project.

If you'd like to build your own digital family tree, feel free to use it, modify it, or contribute.

Main interface of GiaPha-OS