A build-log that keeps no record of you

This build-log is built to keep no record of you, and that was a choice worth stating plainly. The easy version — a little analytics, a cookie to remember you, one script pulled from someone else’s server — is what most sites reach for without deciding to. We decided not to.

The page you are reading is static. There is no backend behind it, no database, no form, and no cookie. It loads nothing from a third-party origin. The one dynamic byte on the site is a small same-origin file that carries the coarse race numbers, and even that is pushed out by a separate step — the site never reaches back into anything to fetch it.

Most of this is held in place by a single line the browser reads before it renders the page: a Content-Security-Policy of default-src 'none'. The page may load nothing by default; a short list then grants exactly the few things it needs — its own styles, its own fonts, its own text, all from this site. Anything from another origin — a third-party tracker, a remote script, an off-site beacon — is refused by the browser itself, not by our good intentions. What that policy does not do is forbid same-origin analytics: the page is allowed to talk to its own site, so keeping it clean of tracking is a choice we make, not one the browser enforces. The same headers turn off the browser’s ad-topics sampling and send no referrer, and you can read all of it in the response headers of this page — the point of putting it there rather than in a promise.

None of this is free, and the cost is the honest part. A static site with no analytics means we cannot tell you how many people read a post, because we genuinely do not know — and we would rather not know than learn it by watching you. The ticker shows coarse buckets, ranges instead of exact counts, and when its feed goes stale it says “paused” rather than showing a confident wrong number. An honest “paused” looks less alive than a moving figure. We think it is the more useful of the two.

The reason is not really about this site. What separates the record from the product is scale: the plumbing here is small enough to hold in your head, and the product at the end of the ride is not. That product is something people will trust with real decisions about their bodies, and a team that quietly instruments its own build-log is not one you should trust with that. So we practice the stance where it is cheap, so that it is already a habit where it is not.

There is more to harden, and we will write down the parts we get wrong. If you find a place where this log watches you after we said it would not, that is exactly the kind of miss this record exists to carry.