We had a baby. Like every sleep-deprived parent we reached for an app to log the feeds, the diapers and the naps, the stuff you genuinely cannot remember at 4am when the pediatrician asks “and how often is he eating?”. I downloaded a few of the popular ones, started reading their privacy policies, and quietly closed all of them.
Because here is the thing nobody puts on the App Store screenshot: a baby tracker is one of the most intimate datasets a family ever produces. Feeding times, sleep patterns, weight curves, health events, minute by minute, for years. I work next to people who do data-marketing and profiling for a living, and the industry is genuinely, impressively good at it. I did not want my son to have a behavioural profile before he could walk. So I built my own, used it at home, and then made it public to share with colleagues. This is that story, and it is at least as much about how I built it as what I built.
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