DEV Community: Moriah Maney

Side Project: Building the Health Tracker I Actually Needed

Moriah Maney — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 23:01:55 +0000

Introduction

If you don't know me that well, you may not know that I have c-PTSD. To be honest, on some days that means I couldn't tell you whether I'd taken my meds that morning. So I went looking for an app to help.

I tried a lot of them, and none of them felt made for me. They were clinical, or they pushed weight loss, or they showed me things I couldn't turn off (a big red arrow because my steps dipped is not nearly as motivating as some people think it is).

So I built the one I wanted. I've been working on it relentlessly for nearly 8 (!) years trying to get it just right. It's called Healthsome, and as of this week it's live on the App Store!

I'm the founder, the designer and (so far) the only engineer, so this post covers a bit of everything: what it does, what it's built with, and a few of the decisions I'm most proud of.

Disclaimer: I do not claim to be a cryptographer. The encryption section below describes what I built and why, using well-established libraries, but it is definitely not a guide to rolling your own crypto (please don't!).

What It Does

Healthsome is a health tracker for people juggling a lot at once: medications, symptoms, mood, sleep, cycles, workouts, water, food and habits. There are fourteen tracker types and twenty-one ready-made templates, or you can build your own exactly the way you like it.

It's built on one rule: your health data is yours. A few other things that make it different from the apps I tried:

It doesn't grade you. There's no red for a missed dose and no traffic-light colors on completion rates. A missed dose or a slower week is information, not a failure, so it's shown plainly, like any other week.
You decide what shows up. Any tracker or tag can be hidden from your timeline (or from everywhere) without being deleted.
The journal lives on the same timeline as your numbers, so the story and the data stay together.
Workouts are built in, both strength (sets, reps, RPE and an estimated 1RM) and GPS cardio with live distance and pace on your Lock Screen.

Tech Stack

It's a TypeScript monorepo managed with Nx.

Piece	Built with
Mobile app	Expo (SDK 56), Expo Router, React Native 0.85
Website and web app	Next.js (the web app is invite only for now while I finish it)
API	Express and MongoDB, deployed on Vercel, with zod validating everything coming in
Shared package	Types, insight math, formatting and copy, used by both the app and the web
Auth	Auth0
Subscriptions	RevenueCat
Monitoring	Datadog
Encryption	AES-256-GCM via `expo-crypto`

The shared package was honestly one of the best early decisions I made. Anything both the app and the web need lives there, so the two can't quietly disagree about how a streak is counted or what an insight says.

Releases go through three channels: alpha, beta and production. JavaScript-only changes ship as EAS updates, and promoting an update to the next channel republishes the exact bundle that was already tested, rather than building a fresh one from whatever the branch looks like by then.

Encryption

This was the part I cared about most, and definitely the part I was most nervous about getting wrong.

The rule I set early on was to never invent my own crypto. Everything uses AES-256-GCM through expo-crypto, which works across iOS, Android and the web.

Here's how the keys fit together:

Each account gets one random 256-bit data key. It encrypts the values you log: entry values and details, journal text and tags, medication names and doses, and reminder text.
The data key is kept in the device's secure storage. It never goes to the server unwrapped.
During setup you get a 12-word recovery phrase. A key derived from that phrase (with PBKDF2) wraps the data key, and only the wrapped copy is stored on the server. If you get a new phone, you type in the phrase and you're back.
Adding a second device works by pairing. Each device has its own X25519 keypair, and the data key is sealed to it.

All of the app's reads and writes already went through one shared context, so encryption lives at that boundary. Charts, insights and the timeline keep working with plain values on your phone, and no individual screen had to learn anything about encryption. The end result is that I couldn't read what you log even if I wanted to (which I don't!).

Note: it would be really easy to put "the server only holds encrypted data" on a landing page, and it would not be quite true. To sort and filter, the server still needs things like timestamps, IDs, tracker types and Apple Health metric names. The weather feature also sends your location to Open-Meteo. So the copy says "the values you log" are encrypted rather than "all of your data," and the in-app privacy screen spells out exactly what isn't. Every privacy claim in the app was written against a code audit, with a comment next to it explaining what it's allowed to say. I would much rather undersell this than mislead anyone about their health data.

Insights: Statistics, Not AI

I get asked about this a lot! Insights looks for real relationships between the things you track, like whether you sleep better on days you walk more.

I did actually try an on-device AI model for this first. The catch is that it kept hallucinating, describing numbers and patterns that simply weren't in the data. Not great when the data is someone's health! Plain statistics can't make things up, and every result can show its work. So Insights runs on your phone, and no health data is ever sent off to an AI model, because there isn't one.

Under the hood it's a Pearson correlation over the days two trackers have in common, and it's deliberately strict about when it speaks up. A link is only mentioned when:

the correlation is at least moderate (|r| of 0.4 or more),
it's unlikely to be chance (p < 0.05),
there are at least 8 shared days behind it,
and it survives a correction for testing lots of pairs at once, so it doesn't cry wolf.

That said, nobody wants to read a correlation coefficient before coffee. So every insight leads with a sentence in plain language, shows both trackers on one chart (each line scaled to its own range), and tucks the numbers into a small footnote for anyone who wants them. Anything that doesn't clear the bar shows up as "no clear link." It's also never phrased as advice: Healthsome is a tracking and journaling tool, not a medical device, and it will never tell you to change a treatment.

And it works, too! It's found real things in my own data. My mood goes up with the amount of reading I log, and I walk more on weekends but take more flights of stairs on weekdays. That checks out, since I live in a loft and work from home (on a workday, the stairs are basically my commute).

Design and Accessibility

The whole app sits on a soft, blurry color field, with content floating above it on glass. That gave me two jobs: make the glass feel good, and make sure nothing on top of it gets hard to read.

Glass that works everywhere. Apple's Liquid Glass looks great on iOS 26, but below iOS 26 the native glass view doesn't fail loudly. It just quietly renders a flat, tinted rectangle with no blur at all, so every card turned into a muddy, low-contrast block for anyone on an older phone. I built a drop-in GlassSurface component that checks once whether Liquid Glass is available and falls back to a real blur when it isn't. Every screen uses it, so every screen got the fix at once.

Top: Liquid Glass on iOS 26. Bottom: the blur fallback on iOS 18, instead of a flat tinted block.

Chart colors that pass contrast. Each section of the app has a pale accent color, which is lovely as a tint and terrible as a chart line. The Insights purple drawn as a two-pixel line came out at 1.9:1 against its card, well under the 3:1 minimum for graphical objects. So charts get their own ink: the same hues, stepped darker or lighter for each mode until they clear that bar.

The small stuff. Contrast is checked in both light and dark mode, icon-only controls have screen reader labels (around 200 of them!), and I use Reduce Motion myself, so with it on, the breathing pulse becomes a gentle color cross-fade instead of disappearing completely. Grounding and journal prompts stay in the present, and there's a test that checks for it (my test automation roots are showing). None of this is glamorous, but it's the difference between an app that looks accessible and one that is.

Business Model

Healthsome is $6.99/month with a 7-day free trial. There are no ads, no advertising or analytics SDKs, and nothing is sold to anyone. It's paid for by the people who use it, and that's the whole business model.

The encryption means I can't read your data, and the subscription means I'm not trying to.

Takeaways

In the end, I'm so incredibly proud of how this turned out. It's the first side project I've ever shipped that felt finished (at least for now, since there's an Android app and a web app on the way).

Healthsome is out now on iPhone, and Android is coming soon.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6740287835
Website: https://healthsome.io
The longer case study, with screenshots: https://moriah.dev/projects/healthsome/

I'd love to hear what you think, especially if you live with a chronic illness or mental health stuff and have opinions about what tracking apps get wrong. Comments are open, or you can reach me at hello@healthsome.io.

And if you're building in health tech, I'd gently encourage you to ask who your app makes feel bad, and whether it has to. Now imagine how many more people would actually keep using these tools if more of them were built with that question in mind.

Side Project: Water Cooling My PC

Moriah Maney — Mon, 13 Aug 2018 18:49:57 +0000

Note: this was originally posted on my personal website at moriahmaney.com

Introduction

I built my first desktop computer as a teenager when I started to become interested in PC gaming. Since then, I've done multiple iterations and upgrades until I finally arrived at a place where I was comfortable enough to water cool my computer. Water cooling is often done by hobbyists as a way to reduce temperatures and noise, and to enable overclocking hardware components while maintaining good temperatures.

Disclaimer: I do not claim to be an expert on water cooling. If you plan to water cool a PC, this guide is mainly to serve as an introduction to the process and to chronicle my own journey water cooling my PC. It is not comprehensive by any means.

Part List

Item	Type	Link
Motherboard	ASUS Strix Z370-E	http://a.co/5Dq88Cr
Processor	Intel i7-8700K	http://a.co/fZD5R7U
Graphics Card	EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti SC Black Edition	http://a.co/9IbItRz
RAM	Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4	http://a.co/5hmcAUN
Power Supply	Corsair RM750x	http://a.co/bXYCbwB
Storage	Kingston 240GB SSD	http://a.co/8QtGGgp
Storage	Kingston 120GB SSD	http://a.co/5oXpV3U
Storage	WD Black 2TB HDD	http://a.co/bbt9Jfk
CPU Waterblock	EK-Supremacy EVO	https://bit.ly/2rIgtLk
GPU Waterblock	EK-FC Titan X Pascal	https://bit.ly/2MaONxv
GPU Backplate	EK-FC Titan X Pascal Backplate	https://bit.ly/2KiQDHB
Pump/Reservoir	EK-XRES 140 Revo D5 PWM	https://bit.ly/2h11XJi
Radiator	EK-CoolStream CE 280	https://bit.ly/2fUpQpV
Fans	EK-Vardar EVO (2)	https://bit.ly/2MlCTA3
Tubing	EK-DuraClear	https://bit.ly/2FvLedA
Fittings	EK-ACF Fitting 10/13mm (8)	https://bit.ly/2nyxckA
Fluid	PrimoChill Vue	https://bit.ly/2P0QfAm
Cables	CableMod ModFlex Pro	https://bit.ly/2Ozgwoz
PCI-E Extension	EZDIY-FAB	http://a.co/hBH9W3r
Case	Fractal Design Define R6	https://bit.ly/2LZp6Pv

Process

Testing

Building your PC using the original cooling (air) ahead of time if you're building completely from scratch is an important step. This will ensure all of your components work before adding the additional complexity of water cooling. Building a PC from scratch is outside the scope of this write-up, so that's as in depth as I will go here.

Planning

Planning your loop properly is one of the most important ways to make sure your components will work together and avoid spending extra money on part incompatibilities. In addition, it is recommended to draw your loop out ahead of time. If you're building your loop alone, measuring tubing lengths is recommended at this stage. I had another person to help me, so we ran the tubing, marked it, and cut it as we went instead.

Fitting

I had originally ordered an NZXT H500 for this build, then realized the NZXT 500i was the only version with the ability to vertically mount the GPU. As this was a core component of the build asthetic I was going for, I re-ordered an NZXT H500i and had to wait for it to arrive. Once it arrived, I started to dry fit the reservoir/pump and the raditator, only to realize they wouldn't fit in the case without a massive amount of overcrowding. An important note is that the NZXT H500i is a brand new case, so I didn't have many reviews to go off of and just went on hope. This is where you do as I say and not as I do, and plan ahead of time so it doesn't happen to you.

More Fitting

After realizing my second case also didn't work, I did an extensive amount of research and landed on the Fractal Design Define R6 in white. I watched countless YouTube builds with watercooling to make sure it would actually fit. I had to wait another week for this case to arrive, but when it did I could finally do another dry fitting. Below is a photo of the dry fit (I had already removed the pump and reservoir, but you get the idea).

Assembly

I started this build by installing the power supply and routing the cables through the case to get them exactly how I wanted them. This is a good first step especially if you want clean cable management throughout. Below is a photo of the cable management on the back side of the case.

Next, mount the CPU water block to the motherboard, and be careful to not overtighten it.

Whatever GPU water block you purchase should come with instructions on removing the air cooler from your graphics card and installing the water block. Below are a few photos of the process to visualize this step.

Once you've removed the air cooler and removed the original thermal pads, the instructions will tell you where to place the new thermal pads and how to install the water block. Below is a photo of my GPU with the water block fully installed.

The next step is to mount the radiator, fans, and reservoir inside the case. Below is a photo with these components installed.

Next, install the fittings where you will have tubing and caps on any ports where you will not. After that, mount the GPU inside your case. I used the riser cable for this step since I wanted a vertically mounted GPU.

With everything installed, I started running tubing inside the case, marking it, and cutting it for each run. If you are doing this alone, you may have already measured these lengths and cut them, so this step is not necessary and you can skip straight to attaching the tubes. Below are photos as I measured, cut, and attached the tubing.

Leak Test

Before you do a leak test, you should place as many paper towels as you reasonably can under every set of fittings in your build. This will help catch any leaking water and you can easily touch test the paper towels throughout to ensure they stay dry.

To fill my loop, I used a kitchen funnel and a spare piece of tubing to fill the reservoir. Then (using a jumper on the power supply ATX 24-pin to run the pump), I slowly added the PrimoChill Vue System Prep mixed with distilled water, cycling the power supply to pull the water through the loop. Once the loop was full, I let it run for a few hours until I was satisfied there were no leaks. Below is a photo of my computer during the leak test.

Note: Do not run the pump with no water in the reservoir. This can and will burn out your pump very quickly

After the leak test, I removed the jumper and reconnected my components. I used the system normally for three days to let the system prep run while continuing to keep a close eye on it for any leaks.

Flush

To flush the loop, I unmounted the GPU from the case and drained it from the plug there into a bowl. Once the water level was sufficiently low, we picked up the case and tilted it around (very carefully) until any remaining fluid drained out. After that, I refilled it with distilled water and drained it again after running it for a few minutes with the jumper cable as described in the leak test section above.

Refill

Once the system was totally drained, I refilled it using the same process as described in the leak test section using my final fluid (PrimoChill Vue). I let it run normally for a few days to get rid of any air bubbles, then topped of the reservoir until it was as full as I could comfortably make it. Below are some photos of the completed build.

Takeaways

In the end, I'm incredibly pleased with how this build turned out. It's the first build I've ever done where it felt completed (at least for now). If I could do it over again, I definitely would have been more careful to not order a brand new case without waiting for reviews and build videos to go live. Water cooling is an expensive and complicated process, but now I have a computer I am truly proud that I built.

Resources

Nevertheless, Moriah Coded

Moriah Maney — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 01:06:41 +0000

I began to code because...

To be honest, I began to code because I needed a stable job and a stable income. I knew that if I was going to go into debt to go to school, it needed to be something that would actually pay my bills afterwards.

What I never expected was that I would completely fall in love with coding. As I mentioned in my last year's #shecoded post, I chose Computer Science as my major after attending a SWE event at the University of Central Florida where I got to code some routines for a little robot. It made me so excited and so happy in a way nothing else in STEM had before. I still feel so grateful every day to have a job that makes me happy and pays my bills.

I continue to code because...

Every day I go into work, there are new challenges and new problems to solve. I love that coding continues to exercise my mental muscles even outside of a university setting.

I'm an expert at...

Test automation. My first internship was a QA internship where I began to learn how to write automated test suites. Based on my success there, I was offered a job to build up a new project's test automation suite. I've been doing test automation for quite a few years now, and finally sort of feel comfortable saying I'm an expert at it.

I recently overcame...

The fear of taking on my first non-testing related ticket! It was a small bug fix, but everyone starts somewhere!

I'm excited about...

Learning new types of coding! I expressed my desire to transition out of only working on test automation and moving into feature development, and the leaders at my work have listened and are working on helping me transition.

I want to brag about...

Shortly after my post from last year, I graduated from the University of Central Florida with my BS in Computer Science. I landed a pretty great gig immediately after and have been working there happily ever since.

I deserve credit for...

I work relentlessly hard to ensure that everything gets done and done well. I don't often brag on myself, so this was a hard question, but one that I'm glad was proposed as an idea.

I look up to...

Every single person who is underrepresented in tech (especially those I've befriended on Twitter). You all inspire me every single day and I feel a little less alone because of you.

My advice for allies to support women and non-binary folks who code is..

Advocate for women and underrepresented groups everywhere you go. It has made a world of difference for me to be in an environment where I'm respected and empowered to do my best work and be my authentic self. Use your privilege to speak up if you see others being disrespectful towards someone or creating an uncomfortable situation. Make sure you're building a diverse, welcoming team both in your hiring processes and in the day-to-day work environment.

My advice for other women and non-binary folks who code is...

You are intelligent, worthy, and capable. You deserve to not only be in tech, but to be comfortable here and to take up space here.

I also want you to remember that you don't have to be strong all the time. It's okay to get tired and worn down from what you deal with just to be here. Just remember that you deserve to stay and you should stay as long as you want to.

Nevertheless, Moriah Maney Coded

Moriah Maney — Wed, 08 Mar 2017 03:14:31 +0000

I began coding because...

When I was younger, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do, but I always gravitated toward STEM subjects. In high school, I attended a SWE event at the University of Central Florida. After spending the day doing some basic coding, I fell in love with it. Coding was so exciting in a way that I never had been excited about a subject before, so I decided to attend UCF as a Computer Science major.

I'm currently hacking on...

Between school and work, I don't spend much time on personal projects (for now!). I'm a software developer primarily focused in QA, and spend most of my time coding test automation suites.

I'm excited about...

Graduation! I'm a senior in my last semester of my Computer Science B.S. and I'm set to graduate in May.

My advice for other women who code is...

To the young women and girls thinking about majoring in STEM: we need you. There are so few of us, and we have to be the change we want to see. You bring unique perspectives & ideas to the table and diversity is so important. Never forget that you are just as capable and just as intelligent as anyone else. It will be discouraging and hard sometimes, but I wouldn't choose anything else if I could start college over again.