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Show HN: I made a privacy friendly and simple app to track my menstruation

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Re: Show HN: I made a privacy friendly and simple app to track my menstruation

#101

Post by sillysaurusx »

I’d like to post a different sort of off-topic comment. As someone who’s married to a brilliant programmer and has a daughter almost a year old, thank you for showing a public example of simply being a woman in tech.

We don’t plan on shoving our daughter in front of an editor from a young age — we have no expectations of her, and she’s free to be whoever she wants to. But one reason my wife didn’t get into programming till her mid 20s was that there weren’t any examples of people like herself doing it. It didn’t occur to her that she might have a talent for it, or even enjoy it. It’s a bit like a man not realizing he might be a great dancer, simply because most dancers are women, and so he never explores the question.

I guess I’m just grateful you’re tipping the scales in the other direction. The work doesn’t need to be anything spectacular or solve all the world’s problems; solving your own problems with code is the essence of hacking. I hope that our daughter Kess grows up in a world filled with many more people like yourself.

I went back and forth about whether to even post this, for obvious reasons. But ultimately I have no way of thanking you other than this, and it meant a lot to me to see your work on the front page. I hope you have a wonderful week, and that your project achieves everything you were hoping for.

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy friendly and simple app to track my menstruation

#103

Post by stormqueen »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #101

I’d like to post a different sort of off-topic comment. As someone who’s married to a brilliant programmer and has a daughter almost a year old, thank you for showing a public example of simply being a woman in tech. We don’t plan on shoving our daughter in front of an editor from a young age — we have no expectations of her, and she’s free to be whoever she wants to. But one reason my wife didn’t get into programmin…

Thank you for your positive comment. I really appreciate that – the topic of women in the tech industry is particularly close to my heart!

I wish you and your family all the best – you made my day :)

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy friendly and simple app to track my menstruation

#104

Post by dalben »

beretguy wrote: post #93
vidyesh wrote: post #85

Congrats on the launch! Since this is on Google Play Store I want to ask why is it not viable with user's consent to just sync app data with your own(user's) Google account? I understand (and support) the reluctance to register and save data in some third party server which likely will use or sell your data but isn't app data in your Google Account very safe? Google App Backup is basically storing user data in their…

[flagged]

(That would be a semantic error rather than syntactic error, no?)

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy friendly and simple app to track my menstruation

#105

Post by sillysaurusx »

stormqueen wrote: post #103
sillysaurusx wrote: post #101

I’d like to post a different sort of off-topic comment. As someone who’s married to a brilliant programmer and has a daughter almost a year old, thank you for showing a public example of simply being a woman in tech. We don’t plan on shoving our daughter in front of an editor from a young age — we have no expectations of her, and she’s free to be whoever she wants to. But one reason my wife didn’t get into programmin…

Thank you for your positive comment. I really appreciate that – the topic of women in the tech industry is particularly close to my heart! I wish you and your family all the best – you made my day :)

I was honestly terrified to post it. I didn’t want to cause you any problems (e.g. if the replies turned into a dumpster fire) or any weirdness (it’s really hard to strike a balance between saying everything you want to, and not being overbearing about it). It’s a relief that the message made it to you and brightened up your day a bit more.

All the best to your family as well — we hope to have two one day too.

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy friendly and simple app to track my menstruation

#106

Post by badcppdev »

entwife wrote: post #100
nomilk wrote: post #64

Are the use cases for period tracking: 1. helps planning (e.g. same way a weather app helps decision making around when to do / not do various activities), and 2. improves accuracy of estimating whether conception may have occurred (vs not tracking). Are these correct; are there others?

Use cases: health indicators, avoiding conception, achieving conception, and accurate pregnancy dating. A well developed period tracking system with a long history is the Creighton Method. Briefly, individuals are trained person-to-person to collect consistent, reliable repeatable data. This can be compared between users, and has many uses. However, the data collection is inconvenient or in some cases impossible, and…

> and they will only train married women.

Who is 'they'? I'm going to have to dive into google aren't I?

Edit: Ok. Returned from rabbit hole. They = religious types who have thoughts about conception and contraception.

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy friendly and simple app to track my menstruation

#107

Post by alimbada »

stormqueen wrote: post #88
vidyesh wrote: post #85

Congrats on the launch! Since this is on Google Play Store I want to ask why is it not viable with user's consent to just sync app data with your own(user's) Google account? I understand (and support) the reluctance to register and save data in some third party server which likely will use or sell your data but isn't app data in your Google Account very safe? Google App Backup is basically storing user data in their…

Thanks! The backup feature is already on my roadmap to offer it as an optional feature - but since you can manually import and export your data, it's not a high priority yet. F-Droid may be an option - but for now the project is not open source. so I think that's not possible

I may be wrong but I don't think your app needs to be open source to publish it on F-Droid.

Edit: Sorry, seems I was wrong [1] but you can host your own F-Droid repository which can be added to F-Droid by users to install your app from.

https://forum.f-droid.org/t/non-open-source-apps-are-allowed...

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy friendly and simple app to track my menstruation

#108

Post by franky47 »

Great work! I've been following Benedicte Raae [1] for a while, who built an end-to-end encrypted period tracking web app [2].

Also agree with other voices here: open-source (or at least open distribution via f-droid) would help building trust in the product.

[1] https://twitter.com/raae

[2] https://github.com/raae/pow-app

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy friendly and simple app to track my menstruation

#109

Post by bluebird88 »

I love this! I created a digital watch that also tracks your cycle with no app (Immi Watch) - basically, we added extra screens that tell you key info about your cycle (what day you're on, when your next period is due to start, avg cycle length). I had really similar pain points to you, just wanted something simple and private. We're actually now doing a desktop version of what you've done! Would be amazing to connect, I love that there's more innovations in this space to meet different women's preferences :)

Re: Show HN: I made a privacy friendly and simple app to track my menstruation

#110

Post by ntaso »

Great idea, especially since many popular cycle tracking apps have a bad rep of sharing data eagerly with Facebook and other entities.

One thing though: I know it's popular in these apps to show the cycle as a "clock face", but if you think about it, this is a weird representation, because of the variations in cycle lengths (of natural cycles not changed by contraceptive hormones). So, if one cycle is 26 days long and the next cycle is going to be 30 days long, the clock face will show an average of 26 days for the next cycle and the handle looks stuck "5 minutes before 12" and every day, the handle doesn't tick one further, but the unit (day) becomes more compressed.

This makes comparing cycles unintuitive and suggests that natural cycles always have the same length. In reality, the majority of women have fluctuations of 8 days or more in their cycle's lengths per year.

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