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by _Chief63 days ago |
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upvoteby whydoineedthis62 days ago|
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I used to work for Lark. They raised $140mm to solve this problem and the best they could do was a non-ai chatbot that whined at users for not eating enough vegetables. The Lark app has 100% user drop off in 60 days and yet is still the silicon darling in the diabetes space.

Your platform has more science & more solution than 100 engineers in 3 years could produce. Keep at it and know with confidence that there is great value in what you are building. I know it's not your primary goal, but this will be lucrative if you keep going. I wish you a lot of luck, this is very cool!

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upvoteby jeeeb63 days ago|
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I just wanted to say I had exactly the same experience this month.

I was diagnosed with LADA type 1 diabetes. First in my family to have it.

My immediate reaction was wanting to put together something to track my diet, blood glucose weight and so on.

Thank you for sharing your experience.

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upvoteby westpfelia63 days ago|
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Is this just for Type 1 or would type 2 work well also? Seems like it would?
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upvoteby _Chief63 days ago|
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All types. The sugar dashboard allows import of data from different glucose apps, so its goal is to allow you visualize and analyze your data. I hope to integrate with cgms directly if I get some that allow it, and also source from Health connect. Sharing with specific people eg doctor is also a big ask that I'm working on. The other WIP tools will be fore general health, not just diabetes, like carb counting from a photo via AI
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upvoteby jekude63 days ago|
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Also recently diagnosed and just open sourced how I'm using AI to count carbs + get insulin doses [1]. Biggest issues I've seen to starting a legit business is not having sanctioned access to real-time blood sugar values (the APIs are all one hour behind), and dealing with the FDA. Love the idea of more tech-enabled diabetes management, good luck!

[1] https://github.com/kennedyjustin/BolusGPT

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upvoteby _Chief63 days ago|
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Love this! Thank you for sharing! My backend is also in Go so this is a godsend. Will see how I can incorporate and let you know if I do!

> not having sanctioned access to real-time blood sugar values (the APIs are all one hour behind)

Ah, I didn't know this. One of the prospective tools I had in mind was real time alerting in case of drastic drops eg ping doctor or relative. I think will have to be limited to the apps/tools that do support realtime.

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upvoteby jekude63 days ago|
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Technically there is unsanctioned access (someone reverse engineered the real-time APIs [1] which I ported to Go). I think the FDA does not want easy access to real-time values so that folks can't easily recommend insulin dosing without oversight. I am personally of the opinion that it is our right to have programmatic access to the real-time data and do with it what we please.

Would love to get in touch to hear more about your long-term vision for the project!

[1] https://github.com/gagebenne/pydexcom

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upvoteby pbhjpbhj63 days ago|
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>so that folks can't easily recommend insulin dosing without oversight //

Is there genuinely a consideration here beyond not allowing activity without paying money to the hegemony?

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upvoteby jekude62 days ago|
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Insulin is lethal at higher dosages, so there is definitely an argument. My counter would be that someone who has to self administer this drug 5+ times a day should have the right to make determinations about dosing
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upvoteby selimthegrim63 days ago|
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I used to work for another diabetes management platform (NuMedics), great to see more entries into the space especially from LDCs
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upvoteby kakoni63 days ago|
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Great stuff!

> I tried getting some CGMs to use but most don't work in Kenya as they are geo-locked

Are you familir with xdrip? (https://github.com/NightscoutFoundation/xDrip) It works directly with various cgm sensors (dexcom etc.)

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upvoteby _Chief63 days ago|
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yes, came across xdrip+ when looking for an android app I could use for Libre 2. I don't think Dexcoms are sold in Kenya, and even the Libres around are UK ones so you need 1) a VPN to setup, 2) an iphone. Both things being a challenge for most - I had to buy a my first ever iphone for this. Anyway, found xdrip a bit of a challenge to setup and a bit too technical to suggest to others; needs sideload and manually disabling a lot of Android defaults.

I had a lot of success with Juggluco[1] which is available on the Play Store and provides easy to use APIs to interact with supported CGM readings. Juggluco has an inbuilt xdrip web server but I haven't tried it yet.

Will definitely look into xdrip+ further.

[1] https://github.com/j-kaltes/Juggluco

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upvoteby shiggaz63 days ago|
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That's so cool! Nice work!! Are you happy to share how you built and host it? How long has it taken you to get it to this point?
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upvoteby _Chief63 days ago|
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Thanks! I started out with a Nextjs full stack on Vercel, with db on Turso but ended up with a React frontend (next on vercel) and Go backend (selfhosted on vps).

Decided to port the backend to Go + postgres (on a Hetzner VPS), and retain the frontend on Nextjs - A lighter weight client, moving most of the compute to the backend API. Few reasons for the port: I've had a lot more success/stability with Go backends, Turso pulled multi-tenant dbs which is what I mostly wanted them for, Nextjs is getting too hard for me.

Go backend is just the std lib (1.22+ server with the nice routing) - I mostly write all the lines in this

Frontend is textbook modern react: React19,next15,tailwind4 - AI mostly writes the code in the frontend (Cursor + Cline + sequentialthinking + context7 + my own custom "memory bank" process of breaking down tasks). AI is really, really good at this. I wrote this https://image-assets.etelej.com/ in literally 2 days 2 weekends ago with less than 10% of code being mine (mostly infra + hono APIs)

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