Keeping lists from getting lost

A shopping list that only lives in the browser disappears the day you switch phones, or simply the day you open the site from work instead of from home. The comparator already worked, but it was still a demo: useful once, useless the following week.

This was the jump from “something that runs on my laptop” to “something people can actually rely on”: accounts, sign-in, lists that travel between devices. And with accounts comes a responsibility that can’t wait — if you’re going to store someone’s shopping list, you need to be able to tell them exactly how carefully it’s stored. So alongside login, I wrote the first version of the privacy policy. Not as a formality, but as an honest answer to the question anyone would ask before handing over their information.

In parallel, without it showing in the product yet, something bigger got started: the plan to move all of this from my laptop to real cloud infrastructure. It would take several more weeks to finish, and with it, the ability to run without depending on my own computer staying on.

But before thinking about the cloud there was a problem still on the table — the one left only half-solved in the first version: getting the system to recognize when two products, written differently, were actually the same one.