Devlogs
The build diary
What changed this week, what broke, and what I got wrong. These are not tutorials and they do not pretend the work went smoothly.
Filter by project Training Board
Grouped by project so someone following one build can read only that.
What's next: an MCP server over the training data
The design for letting Claude search the catalogue, show a movement, write a programme and log a set. Read-only tools first, an identity problem the research did not anticipate, and why the API key trap from the migration applies inside every tool too.
Replacing Payload with Appwrite: what flat columns cannot hold
Dropping a Postgres container by moving rows, 2,648 files and every account into Appwrite. Two data shapes that did not survive the move intact, three query shapes only a live instance will tell you about, and a config value that was frozen into the production build at http://build-only.
The progression redesign: XP nobody stores, and a streak that allows rest days
The board was a catalogue with statistics bolted on top. Rebuilding it as a progression view: a HUD strip, a season grid, milestone tiers, and a day streak that survives a rest day on purpose. Plus the dark mode that existed in the tokens for weeks and was never once reachable.
Making it a phone app: a service worker that was worse than no service worker
The board was laid out for a desktop browser that happened to be narrow. Turning it into something usable one-handed in a gym: bottom nav, a manifest, twelve iOS splash sizes, and three bugs a desktop will never show you. One of them was my own service worker stalling every image after the first.
A training board on Payload, and the scoreboard that added up two people
Turning a 1,324-exercise dataset into a gym scoreboard. Why sets are one row each stamped with a local calendar day, why the streak counts weeks rather than days, and the ownership bug that showed the admin 21.9 tonnes of training when only 11.0 of it was theirs.