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About the author

Jimenez Julien, the person who builds and answers for CareCircleLog

Software developer, publisher of CareCircleLog, and the person on the other end of the support email when a family cannot get a refill countdown to behave.

Portrait of Jimenez Julien
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Why I built a caregiving log

I started CareCircleLog because of a whiteboard in a kitchen in Newark, New Jersey. A woman named Patrice had drawn a grid on it: seven columns for the days, four rows for the pills, and a column on the right where her brother was supposed to write what he did on the weekends. He never wrote in it. She kept the whole week in her head instead, and when she got the flu in February the week fell apart in about eighteen hours. Nobody knew which pharmacy held the prescription. Nobody knew the podiatrist appointment had moved. That is not a technology problem in the abstract. It is a very specific, very ordinary failure of shared memory, and it happens to millions of American families every week.

I spent the first two years of this product not writing code. I sat in kitchens and at agency scheduling desks. I rode along on home health visits in Rhode Island and Michigan with permission from the families, and I asked to see the paper. Everyone had paper: a legal pad, the back of a discharge summary, a note in a phone, a shoebox of pharmacy printouts. What I learned is that families do not want software. They want the argument to stop. They want to know that the 8 a.m. dose went in without texting anyone, and they want the person who is doing the most to feel less alone in it. Every screen in CareCircleLog gets judged against that, and quite a few of my early ideas failed the test and were removed.

The hardest lesson was about who actually touches the product. In a typical circle, one adult child does eighty percent of the work and becomes the account owner. The others participate in short bursts, often from a phone in a parking lot, sometimes resentfully. A paid aide may not want another login, may be working two jobs, and may be reading in a second language. If the product only works when all six people behave like software users, it does not work. That is why a duty reminder can be answered by a one word text message, why the aide check in link needs no account, and why the printed emergency room sheet exists at all. Paper still wins in a triage bay at three in the morning, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

I am also careful about what this product is not. CareCircleLog is not a medical device, it does not give clinical advice, and it does not decide anything about a person's treatment. It is a record and a schedule that a family keeps together. When a customer asks for a feature that would edge toward clinical judgment, I say no and explain why. I would rather be a very good notebook than a mediocre imitation of a nurse.

Experience and expertise

  • Eleven years building and shipping web software, the last four of them entirely in products used by small operators rather than large enterprises.
  • Direct field research with 61 family care circles and 9 home care agencies across Michigan, Rhode Island, North Carolina, Texas and Oregon between 2023 and 2026.
  • Working knowledge of the practical documents that surround home care in the United States: discharge medication lists, home health plans of care, durable power of attorney paperwork, and the intake packets agencies use.
  • Publisher and operator of the whole stack behind this product, from the hosting configuration to the support inbox, with no outsourced support layer between the customer and the person who wrote the code.
  • Founder of MLJ, SASU, the French company that publishes CareCircleLog and a small family of other operator focused tools.

How this product is built and maintained

Every claim on this site is one I can show you in an account. The survey numbers quoted on the home page come from 1,206 circles that had been active for at least 90 days in January 2026, and I will send the question wording to anyone who asks. Testimonials are published with the person's consent and their real employer, and they get a chance to revise their words before I use them. When a metric moves in the wrong direction, I change the number on the page rather than quietly leaving the good one up.

Product work runs on a two week rhythm. Support conversations from the previous fortnight are read in one sitting and sorted into three piles: broken, confusing, and missing. Broken always jumps the queue. Confusing usually gets fixed with words rather than features, because most of what looks like a feature request is really a labeling problem. Missing goes onto a list that I review with a small group of customers, including two agency owners and one aging life care manager, who tell me plainly when an idea would waste their staff's time.

Editorially, the standard is simple: nothing on this site is written by a machine and left unread, no page describes behavior the product does not have today, and every price shown is the price you pay. Security and privacy work is not a feature release, it is maintenance: dependency updates, access reviews, and a yearly walk through of what data we hold and whether we still need it. If something goes wrong on my side, customers hear it from me first, in plain language, with what I am doing about it.

Contact the author

Write to me at jimenezjulien42@gmail.com. I read everything and reply within one business day, and I would rather hear about a rough edge while you are annoyed than three months later. If you are a care manager or an agency owner with a workflow that does not fit, tell me the workflow, not the feature. I will usually ask to watch you do it once.

Profiles and public work

Published articles

Everything below is reported and written by me for Kitchen Table Care, the CareCircleLog magazine on the money, the paperwork and the daily logistics of caring for an aging parent at home.

This page is maintained by Jimenez Julien and was last reviewed on March 2, 2026. See the site map for everything published here, or read the questions families ask.