About Hamaki
Two lecturers, one scheduling problem, and a Japanese hammock.
Scheduling should feel like a hammock
ハンモック — hanmokku — is the Japanese word for hammock. That's the feeling Hamaki is built around: once your booking page is set up, you lean back while everything arranges itself.
No more reply-all email threads. No sharing your calendar with a cloud service. Just a link, a page, and people who book themselves in.
Meet Raymond & Tjerk
Both lecturers at NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences, both tired of scheduling meetings by email.
Raymond teaches at the Communication & Multimedia Design bachelor's programme (CMDLWD) at NHL Stenden. He also makes macOS apps because the ones he needed didn't exist yet. Hamaki is the best proof of that. He writes about design and technology at raymond.frl.
Tjerk (known online as Potloodgum) teaches alongside Raymond at NHL Stenden's CMDLWD programme. He brings the design sensibility to Hamaki — the sharp eye that makes the interface feel considered and calm, not cluttered. You'll find him on Mastodon at mastodon.design.
Why we built it
The problem
At NHL Stenden's CMDLWD bachelor's programme, students need regular one-on-one meetings with their lecturers — feedback sessions, project reviews, portfolio critiques. Organising these by email meant an endless ping-pong of "are you free Thursday at 2?" "No, what about 3?" "I have a meeting, how about Friday?"
The idea
Online scheduling tools exist, but they all require sharing your calendar with a cloud service, signing up for yet another account, or both. Raymond and Tjerk wanted something that worked with their existing Mac and Calendar.app — private, local, and actually fun to use.
The result
Hamaki launched in 2024 and has been shipped continuously since. From basic booking pages to waiting lists, AI integration, Spotlight search, and a CLI — it keeps growing because Raymond and Tjerk use it themselves every day. When something is annoying, they fix it.
Our principles
Your data, your Mac
Hamaki processes everything locally. Your schedule doesn't get synced to our servers, because we don't have any.
A real Mac app
Not a web app wrapped in Electron. Hamaki uses native macOS APIs, respects system settings, and lives in the menu bar where it belongs.
Built by users
Every feature in Hamaki exists because Raymond or Tjerk needed it. No roadmaps driven by investor decks. Just real problems, solved well.