Product
A coach made of rules
The new daily coach is a few if-statements over your own data. Why that beats a generated paragraph, and why the app shows only the notes its existing cards don't already cover.
1 min
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Older posts
DesignA journal that feeds the numbers
Daily mood and a note, a year-in-pixels grid that needs no inline styles, and why mood is the series that makes insights worth having.
1 min
ProductA routine is only an order
Habit routines and the focus timer shipped without touching the streak engine. Why a routine stores nothing but a list of ids, and why the timer stores a start time instead of counting.
2 min
ProductImporting another app's history, and refusing 03/04
Switching habit apps shouldn't cost a streak. How PaceStreak reads Loop's export and generic CSVs, why only year-first dates are accepted, and why an import never overwrites a day.
2 min
Security & PrivacyScanning barcodes without the camera permission
The app's Permissions-Policy says camera=(). Barcode scanning shipped anyway, by reading a photo instead of a video stream, and the lookup sends the barcode and nothing else.
1 min
ProductWhat you burn, from the scale and the food log
How PaceStreak estimates real daily energy expenditure from four weeks of logging, why it refuses to answer with thin or inconsistent data, and the caps on every suggested target.
2 min
Security & PrivacyInsights without a model
PaceStreak's insights compare your own days with a Welch t-test, not an AI. Why the bar for showing a pattern is deliberately high, and why the app tells you it's correlation.
2 min
InfrastructureWhat the free tier actually buys, checked against the account
The API runs on a GCP e2-micro because that's what Always Free covers - one instance, 30 GB of standard disk, an ephemeral IP. It turns out to be sitting exactly at that ceiling, which explains more of the outage two posts back than any single bug did.
3 min
InfrastructureOne outage, four root causes
The API went down behind a Cloudflare Tunnel error and stayed down through a reboot, an interrupted OS upgrade, a stale connection pool, and a box too small for its own workload. None of the four were the same bug.
9 min
ProductTaking PaceStreak public: replacing the waitlist
Every 'Get early access' and waitlist surface on the site now points at a real sign-up, because there's a real app behind it to sign up for.
2 min
Security & PrivacyFixing the dead ends in sign-up and verification
Three real bugs found by using the OTP flow the way a person actually would: a stuck login, a false 'already registered' error, and a confirmation screen that didn't lead anywhere. Plus a status page that finally watches the whole stack.
3 min
PostmortemsA CORS error that was actually a masked 500
Login worked, /me failed, and the browser blamed CORS. The real cause was three layers down: Swarm silently ignoring a short-form tmpfs key, which meant Starlette's outermost error middleware - the one layer that runs before CORS headers exist - was the one answering.
4 min
InfrastructureA status page that watches the whole stack, finally
app and api had no DNS records for most of their existence, so there was nothing to monitor - which meant status.pacestreak.com kept quietly not telling the whole story even after both went live. Fixed, plus a lesson in why a 200 from the app proves nothing about the API behind it.
2 min