The LifeLog story — how the blog that documents everything was born

The blog that wasn’t the center

In early July 2026, I had six active projects — Arachne, Dogwalk, Capivara, Portfolio, TatuEngine, and a growing list of technical discoveries. Each with its own repository, its own CI/CD, its own set of bugs and decisions. I knew tomorrow would have been better if I remembered what I learned today.

That’s how LifeLog was born: not as “yet another blog”, but as the ecosystem’s logbook.

Context — why another blog?

I’ve had blogs before. WordPress, Ghost, Medium — all of them died after the third post. The difference now was the motive: I didn’t want to write for an audience, I wanted to write for my future self.

The brief was simple: a devlog documenting the journey of building the Samuel ecosystem. No SEO, no analytics, no monetization. Just the story.

The stack was obvious: Astro — native SSG, MDX for content, zero JS in the build. Tailwind for styling, TypeScript for sanity. And the simplest possible deploy: Vercel, push to main, done.

The first commit was on July 4:

b5152e8 Initial commit: LifeLog Astro site com Playwright E2E tests

The name “LifeLog” came from life + log — the record of a digital ecosystem’s life. The first version was functional but Spartan: a post timeline, a simple light/dark theme, and 3 E2E tests.

The struggle — 4 themes in 2 weeks

What looked like a simple project (table + posts) turned into a UI/UX lab. In the first 10 days, I rewrote the theme system 4 times:

1. CSS custom properties — simple, but no transition between themes
2. Clip-path circular reveal — pretty, but stuttered on Chromium
3. Native VT crossfade — smooth, but broke on mobile
4. View Transition API + clip-path fallback — finally stable

Each iteration was a battle against stutter — that micro-freeze nobody asks for but everyone feels. Chromium’s View Transition API (VT) was the way out, but it needed animation:none on new(root) to avoid conflicting with the crossfade:

/* After 4 iterations — the theme that finally worked */
::view-transition-old(root),
::view-transition-new(root) {
  animation: none;
  mix-blend-mode: normal;
}
::view-transition-new(root) {
  z-index: 100;
}

Alongside the theme came search. I started with Fuse.js — 7KB minified, it worked. But when the post count passed 30, the bundle started to weigh. I replaced it with a JSON index embedded in the HTML with word-boundary matching. Zero dependencies, zero extra JS in the build.

// The search index — embedded in the HTML as JSON, no Fuse.js
const index = JSON.parse(
  document.getElementById('search-index')?.textContent || '[]'
);
// word-boundary match: "/b" + query + "/b"

And to complete the trio of problems: the tags. Tailwind 4 with color-mix and light/dark themes required opacity hacks that broke in one of the themes. The solution came with color-mix(in srgb, var(--color-accent) 12%, transparent) — which works in both themes without needing a fallback.

Resolution — when I killed the bot

On July 19, the blog already had 20+ posts. But something was wrong: the posts were reports, not stories. I was automating writing with a daily cron that aggregated commits and generated changelogs.

That’s when I realized: nobody wants to read a changelog. Not even me.

On July 24, I killed the auto-post cron and published the post explaining the turn: “From auto-post to narrative — why I killed the daily cron”.

From then on, each post became a chapter: Setup → Conflict → Resolution. Real code from the repository, extracted with git show, nothing from memory. And the weekly schedule became: one project per day, one story per post.

In late July, LifeLog also gained Open Design — a formal design system with DESIGN.md (12KB), CSS tokens, and craft rules. Every color palette, every component, every transition documented in a design contract that the site itself consumes.

Metrics

Takeaways

The biggest lesson wasn’t technical — it was about what’s worth automating. Automate deploy? Yes. Automate tests? Yes. Automate post writing? No — because then you lose the story.

LifeLog taught me that documenting work isn’t about reporting what was done, but about telling why it was done that way.

╔══════════════════════════════════════╗
║  Samuel Medeiros                    ║
║  Senior Software Engineer           ║
║  Stack: Python · TypeScript · Rust  ║
║  Projetos: Arachne, Dogwalk,        ║
║            Capivara, TatuEngine      ║
╚══════════════════════════════════════╝