Decisions, reasoning, and work-in-progress notes from the team building Pouch at Pointegrity. We publish what we figure out as we figure it out — including the tradeoffs, the rejected options, and the things we changed our mind about.
Several of our recent chat-and-canvas apps kept showing up with the same bones — different domain, same scaffold. liugent (liu as in 流, flow) is the scaffold factored out: a small Go bench plus a plugin slot where the domain lives. First plugin is internal, used live during TWSE hours. Notes from the workshop, not a product announcement.
A short break from the serious mini-apps. We dug two small math games out of the drawer and rebuilt them clean — Domino Solver, a partition puzzle, and Cat and Mouse, the 19th-century pursuit game Conway analysed in Winning Ways. Both a small collaboration with the Chiu Chang Mathematics Education Foundation, and a reminder of what a break is for.
A new piece of the family: attic, the backup layer behind pouch, mytraces, and the rest. A polite email from the cloud provider about high outbound traffic turned into a small forensic dig — a few hundred megabytes of actual data was producing several hundred gigabytes of cross-region traffic a week. The mismatch was in how we'd set up the safety net, not in any of the apps.
Notes from rebuilding the bottom sheet in mytraces, a trip-companion app shipping soon. A back-button gesture that opened a Discover modal turned out to be a follow-up tap landing on an invisible chip — and the chase exposed a deeper pattern in how state was scattered across modules. Three architectural slices later, a lesson about where view-coordinated state should live.
A few days reshaping the pouch home view on the phone. Stream-bound drops collapse into pockets, pinned items sit at the top without a label, search moved to a corner icon. Plus a small affordance — a gear on each stream card — that pays the biggest dividend.
A passing note about poi, the typed knowledge index our codebase has been quietly accumulating about itself. Gotchas with file-glob triggers, decisions you stop re-litigating, boundaries that are real gates. Internal dogfood for now — notes from the workshop, not a product announcement.
The same architecture we use in mytraces (travel) shipped first as SC PreAlgebra (math), and now in a third domain — SC Programming. Why this shape keeps showing up in our work, and what it deliberately doesn't try to be.
A status report from inside mytraces, our internal trip-planning project. Why we're building it around two pillars — a curated ontology and an LLM — and how that decision is shaping the work. Internal dogfood for now, design notes worth writing down.
Ten days off the journal. A status report from the workshop floor: a visual-identity system shared across our app family, schema housekeeping in the auth library, real test coverage for previously-untested layers, and the honest answer to the marketing question. Plus a real subscribe form below.
The "free tier, then upsell" playbook is the indie-SaaS default. We chose the opposite — paid-only, 14-day trial, no credit card. The reasoning, the 14-day number specifically, and the real downside of giving up viral free-tier growth.
We needed typography that works for both pouch's UI chrome and long-form writing (this journal, future tutorials, legal pages). System fonts were the cheap default; Inter was the indie-SaaS pick. We went with Plex — and here's the reasoning.
Folders came up early as the obvious way to organize drops. We said no. The alternative is streams — a dimension orthogonal to tags, where the grouping unit carries policy (TTL, retention, eventually replication). This is the decision that keeps pouch from drifting into note-app shape.
We kept getting pulled toward "note app" and "dropbox for small files" as default framings. Neither was right. Pouch is a personal data relay — ephemeral by default, durable by opt-in, yours to own. The positioning decisions that cascade from that framing.
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