Build logs from someone shipping security-first software alone.
Every entry here is a decision from a live product — the zero-knowledge vault behind MyDigitally, why Circal got renamed six weeks out from launch, the Claude Code setup that cut my session overhead in half. Including the calls I got wrong.
I build things to solve problems I actually have, and I write these the way I’d want to read them: what the problem was, what I tried, what broke, and what it cost.
The business side is here too — pricing decisions, pivots, the launches that didn’t land. Separating the engineering from the decisions around it would misrepresent how any of this got built.
I had a demo video with no narration and a stack of AI tools that could hand me a working script in about the time it takes to make coffee. I used them. I’m not going to pretend otherwise, and I’m not going to apologize for it either — that would be its own kind of dishonesty, and I’ve got no patience left for either the “AI wrote my whole app” victory laps
You’ve been deep in a Claude Code session for an hour, you close the terminal, and twenty minutes later you need to get back into that exact conversation. So you dig through claude –resume history, squint at a list of session IDs with no context, and hope you pick the right one. It’s a small tax, but it’s one you pay every single day.
Eventually I realized it wasn’t me. It was the key. The song wasn’t too hard — it was just too high. If I could nudge the whole thing down a few steps, it would land right inside the range I actually have.
The product was rebranded from the placeholder “MyCalendone” to “Circal” (a blend of circadian and calendar) because it is short, easy to pronounce, and describes the product’s core function without overpromising results. To navigate domain availability, the team adopted the practical prefix convention “trycircal.app” as an accessible starting point while focusing on clarity, simplicity, and shipping over cleverness.
The “Why” — What is the real problem? Most people plan their day without any awareness of how their body will actually feel at the time they’ve scheduled something. A
MyCalendone — Your Calendar, Now Alive Introducing MyCalendone Your calendar now knows when you peak. The first calendar that colors your day by your real energy — driven by how
Building MyDigitally: The Journey to Protecting Our Digital Legacies We spend years building our lives online. We buy domain names, accumulate thousands of dollars in gaming libraries, grow monetized
Product Update · Security Narrow Medium Wide 🌙 Dark mode The Encrypted Credential Vault: Zero-Knowledge Security at MyDigitally.app How we built military-grade encryption into your digital legacy — and audited
Building MyDigitally: The Journey to Protecting Our Digital Legacies We spend years building our lives online. We buy domain names, accumulate thousands of dollars in gaming libraries, grow monetized