I maintain a really cool Angular app that I affectionately call the baby log. You can find it and try it out at baby.fluin.io or check out the source code on GitHub. It let's me track the activities that I care about for my two kids. I track things like diapers, sleep, which boob was last used for the little one, and for the big one it's things like medicine, meals, and sleep. (Disclaimer: There's no SLA or guarantees or privacy or security)
Now that 2021 is here and my parental leave is about to end, I decided to get back into things. The best way for me to center myself around work is to make progress (read: ship features) on a personal technology project and do some real software engineering.
I've been thinking about two major challenges with the app that have been affecting us since November.
  • It's too hard to setup new families with multiple kids
  • It's too hard to switch between kids

I have a feature that lets you track one or many kids, but everything was kind of manual and hacky. I was using prompts and if you messed up, the only way to get back to things was to delete your site data and start again. (Your kids names an your connection to them is stored locally, activity data is stored in the cloud).
To this end, over the past two days I've rebuilt a number of pieces of the app, and launched some cool features.
  • You can now "Manage Family" which lets you add children more easily
  • You can rename kids now
  • You can remove kids now
  • Each kid's page gets it's own URL, which means you can bookmark each and put it o the home screen of your phone
  • I bumped up to version 11 of Angular, Angular Material, and the latest AngularFire, ngx-charts, and dependencies.

New home screen shortcuts are now possible
These might not sounds like crazy large features, but they are solid changes to a solid app we've been relying on for over two years now.