Hello, and welcome back!

Today, I get to announce that I have release FitnessTrax 0.1!

FitnessTrax is a health and workout tracking program designed for individual users and following the privacy policy of keeping all of your data on your own computer. Data that lives there cannot be mined and exploited by third party companies that may not really have your privacy in mind.

This is the first version of the application that I feel is suitable for home users. While it is rather ugly, and limited at this time, it is also entirely usable. Over the next few releases, I plan to style the application nicely and to add many other pieces of information to the tracking system.

FitnessTrax is a GTK 3 application. It can currently only be installed from source. A NixOS derivation will be available soon. I am not currently working on installation from Crates.IO, on Ubuntu, or with Flatpack, but all three of these are on my roadmap.

History

This is the culmination of many years of work and learning.

I first started tracking my weight and my bike rides in 2003. I used nothing more than a couple of plain text files. For a long time, that worked, but graphs were impossible, and it was not possible for me to get a coherent view of any particular day in my history without reading information from many different places.

In 2013, I finally started trying to put all of the information into a single database of sorts. From the beginning, I had no desire to set up a separate database server. Aside from simply being overkill for an app that will only recieve a few writes every day, a separate server increases the effort necessary to install an application, and makes data backups significantly harder.

So, I started with a SQLite database and a Haskell web service. Over the years I migrated from SQLite to building an embedded time series database, then from Haskell to Haskell and Javascript, then to Rust and Javascript, Rust and Typescript, and finally to a Rust-only native GTK application.

Over the years I modified, updated, and tweaked the various data models into something that mostly fit the patterns that I could understand. I settled, at long last, on the Record data structure, then defined Weight, Steps, TimeDistance, Duration, and SetRep as records. Further, in my time at Cloud City I learned from several people who are very good at architecting user interfaces, and that has lead to the internal architecture of my application.

It may seem silly that an application that is little more than a glorified spreadsheet could take so long to build. But it should be known that I have developed this application mostly on my own, and have taken many false steps in the process. I have learned a lot, most of which I hope to one day apply to my career. I do not think that I could have ever done any better.