HN Explorer

Show HN: ProgressCove, calm and smart to-do app with Home Assistant integration (progresscove.com)

1 points by twentyshores ↗ HN
TLDR version: ProgressCove, my calm, multiplatform task manager that has a glass half-full perspective, avoids red texts and past due anxiety as it only leads to procrastination.

I talk about: - Brief origin story: How I started writing middleware for another to-do app project status display for Echo Show screen and didn't stop there. - Backend architecture choices: Network segmentation, frameworks and sustainability as a solo dev. - App stack: Expo React Native, WatermelonDB offline first storage with online sync, Cloudflare workers to serve web app, Python FastAPI, PostgreSQL/PgBouncer - AI coding without the slop: How I use Claude as my junior developer under strict technical oversight. - Smart task prioritization: Task and project ordering by a combo metric based on completion percentages, helping users focus on tasks closer to completion and a U-shaped task age decay to surface new items instantly, drop mid-aged tasks, and eventually float old backlog projects. - Smart Home: Home Assistant integration, chores as buttons that dim/highlight based on due status for wall tablets with 10 second debounce window to avoid mistaps. - Soup Mode: Recurring tasks with variations (useful for rotating meals, movies or workout routines) that will randomize your next task. - Advanced options: Keeping things simple and clean for anyone with anxiety and providing secret power user options, such as 8 level deep nesting and ability to name your task tiers, where a project can be a donkey!

Anyone can try out the full-featured, no card required trial for 14 days. All versions, including web app can be found at https://progresscove.com

Full story in first reply

2 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 15.6 ms ] thread
twentyshores
I’m a network engineer in my day job, have two school age kids, I volunteer for my kids scouting troop and have many hobbies (astronomy, electronics, gaming, home server lab to name a few) and I always added tasks faster than I can finish them. I started writing projects and tasks on paper, which quickly became unsustainable. I could see everything ongoing at a glance, but it became useless as I complete and add tasks. Eventually I decided to try some of the popular apps.

Many apps are great at what they do, but I just couldn't find one that fit my needs. Some were based on Kanban/Scrum like approach and I really didn’t want something that reminded me of my day job in my free time. Some would not let me create tasks without due dates. I do my personal projects whenever I have free time, not on a fixed schedule . Others had platform limitations, missing web or mobile app, and some did not let family members create their own projects unless they have their own subscription. I eventually settled on one, decided to write a middleware that would read tasks with API, calculate a completion percentage for each project, generate and upload a status image to Amazon photo gallery to show as slideshow on Echo Show screen. The goal was to keep an eye on what projects I am closer to finishing and which tasks are my next goals. It felt like trying to fit a square into a round hole with an app that wasn't designed for how I think. I decided to ditch the whole middleware approach and started building something I truly wanted to use.

I started with a working title of calmprogress. I aimed for an app where every field except name is optional, and no overdues. Everything that would normally be past due is simply due until done, and ongoing is a valid state. For me and I think for many others, red past due warnings are only a cause for anxiety which leads to procrastination, so I skipped red text (except for very few irreversible actions) completely. Smart Home integrations, no platform lock in, open API, access for whole family as first class users (all family members can create their own tasks, separate from the account holder), offline first with online sync were non negotiables. Making progress towards goals while not causing distress is the main goal of the app, so I decided on the final name of ProgressCove.

Architecture Choices

Backend: Python FastAPI was an easy decision, since an open and accessible API was a nonnegotiable of this project. Nginx proxy to accept connections, PostgreSQL with PgBouncer on a Hetzner VPS. Database is backed up to separate attached disk and periodically dumped, encrypted and backed up off cloud. Everything is built with containers, so I can scale it up without too much trouble. I started with one proxy VPS and one backend VPS and Mikrotik CHR to secure all traffic from proxy to the backend. I was spreading the load across more VPS, prices increased by 300% around this time, so I decided to leave most of it consolidated on a shared VPS until user base growth calls for the expansion.

Frontend: All logic, including smart features of the apps run on the server. The only way to read data from the server is through the API. This allows me to host a lightweight React web app on a Cloudflare worker for the web app. Mobile apps use React Native with Expo. This keeps adding features to both web and mobile versions relatively simple.

AI coding without the slop: I could eventually write everything by hand, but it would take significantly longer. It does not make sense to penalize myself for pride; I used Claude Code to write the code while I provided heavy guidance. If you let Claude write your whole codebase without oversight, it’s more than happy to write 80+ lines of useEffect hooks you can get lost in and throw a single page into a single file instead of breaking into reusable components, negating biggest advantages of React. I followed an iterative process, where I write requirements and explain details such as expected classes, attributes, objects...