Devlog #4
🥀so…for the last few days i’ve been locked in on FORGE.
the idea is pretty straightforward: a hyper-optimized, stripped-down fitness tracker that actually works on low-end hardware.but as always, the execution turned into a whole saga 💔
an apology for going ghost
i’ve been completely away from my usual setup, working from my hometown on just a laptop. no extra monitors, no fancy desk layout—just pure terminal grinding in the wild trying to push commits through.the main thread was choking
the original problem was navigation efficiency.
before today, forcing everything to render at once was treating the app like a bloated mess. every time you tried to jump between the dashboard and the exercise guides, the layout parsing and thread blocking were hogging up to 54ms of raw processing time.if you’re running on legacy hardware, 54ms feels like an eternity.so i tore down the navigation structure.modular pages over everything
instead of loading the entire app layout upfront, i refactored it so every single view—the how-to guides, the specific routines, the exercise logs—loads separately on demand.the performance gains went crazy.if you look at the browser profiling metrics, the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) dropped down to a crisp 0.28s. the navigation jumps are completely instant now, running light enough to make a basic chromebook look fast.muscle relief was breaking
spent a ridiculous amount of time fixing the data logic for the “Muscle Relief” components.it was the usual routine:
hours of tracing UI bugs and state management failures.
fixing a few lines of data persistence so the state doesn’t trip over itself when you switch days.
questioning why it took that long afterward.the architecture isn’t actively trying to kill the main thread anymore, and the app stops screaming at me when i jump between workouts.what’s next?
now that the performance baseline is clean, the plan is to manually iron out the remaining layout bugs before doing any major framework implementation.the core engine is running lean on the T430, and it’s slowly becoming the responsive tool i wanted to build.we’ll see how long that lasts before i break everything again 🥀