Building in public · new entries most weeks
Runninglog
Every stretch of the build, dated and public. If the log goes quiet, ask us why.
Sep 27, 2026
One thing at a time.
Marathon used to teach with a four-slide tour at sign-up, before you had a single class to try anything on. Now one note appears under whichever surface you are actually looking at, and it retires the moment you do the thing rather than the moment you read about it.
Sep 27, 2026
Two tabs go back in the drawer.
Path and Discover both work, and across every account they had three timelines and one club membership between them. They are held out of the nav until the part that does work has your whole attention — nothing is deleted, and every link still opens.
Sep 24, 2026
Draw a timeline from scratch.
Tools is a new tab for the instruments that are not a class, a task or a plan: first in is a timeline you draw to scale, with a legend you edit, notes down the side, and spans for one event that runs 1967 to 1970. Paste from Excel, Sheets or a CSV and it builds itself.
Sep 24, 2026
The notebook got a pen.
Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, highlight, bullets and indents in every class notebook, and a Save button that means it. A bullet one level in is a hollow circle, because that is what a bullet one level in is.
Sep 23, 2026
Time is height.
A block on the week board is as tall as the hours you gave it, so a Tuesday you have overcommitted looks overcommitted before you have to live it. The day visibly fills until it cannot hold any more.
Sep 23, 2026
A streak with a save slot.
Close out the day and the ring keeps your run; miss one and a freeze you earned can cover it instead of the whole thing ending. Seven days is the lock-in window — a week-old run is the hardest one to walk away from.
Sep 22, 2026
The week board.
Days across, bands down, and a pile of everything you have not promised a day to yet. A due date is a fact and a placement is a promise; the board is where you make them, and “Plan my week” now fills it in rather than describing what it would do.
Sep 22, 2026
Lanes, and routines.
Lanes colour the week by the life you are living rather than by which class it belongs to, and Only reads one of them as its own dashboard. Routines are a row of seven cells and never a deadline, because a run you keep four days out of seven is not four failures.
Sep 22, 2026
A degree, drawn as a track.
Path lays the whole degree out as strands that converge on graduation, with what you still owe marked on the way. It ends in something you can press, not a diagram you admire.
Sep 18, 2026
Word syllabi, too.
Not every professor posts a PDF. A .docx goes into the same drop zone and comes out the same way.
Sep 17, 2026
Steps plan backwards.
Break an assignment down and the steps now work back from the deadline instead of forward from today, which is how anyone actually plans an essay. They sit under the week they belong to, at whatever depth you asked for.
Sep 16, 2026
Clubs get a page they run.
Officers, a roster and a schedule the club controls — the half of a semester that never reached anyone’s plan. Import it and the weekly meetings land on your timeline alongside the deadlines.
Sep 15, 2026
Pacer can see the week you actually have.
Connect Google Calendar and Marathon plans around the classes, shifts and practices already on it instead of pretending the week is empty. You pick which calendars count, you see exactly what it read, and the privacy page says where that data goes.
Sep 14, 2026
Stop handing the last 10% back.
Every surface that used to end in a summary now ends in something you can press. And coming back after a gap costs nothing — catch-up re-paces what you missed instead of showing you a wall of red.
Sep 13, 2026
Five kinds of work, five colours.
The track draws every category from the mark’s own palette, so one set of names and one set of colours holds across the whole app. Seventeen of the eighteen schools on the wall got their real artwork while we were in there.
Sep 11, 2026
Delete means delete.
We made the promise true before we printed it: the privacy page now describes what actually happens, asks before the cookie, and says what your email is for. A claim on that page that you cannot check has no business being on it.
Sep 10, 2026
Every reading, on the day its class meets.
A readings-only syllabus used to import nothing at all. Now each session’s reading lands on the weekday that class actually meets — one task per session, not one per chapter.
Sep 8, 2026
Read the syllabus, then fill in the class.
Upload first and the class builds itself around what was read: coursework, every instructor, office hours, the textbook, when it meets. The tasks stream in as they are found, beside the syllabus they came from, so you can check the evidence.
Aug 25, 2026
A day that can actually end.
Today tells you what to lead with, explains why it picked that, and gives overdue work a way out. Then it lets you finish — a day with no closing move is a day you never leave.
Aug 25, 2026
A class page that is a command centre.
One workspace per course instead of stacked widgets: coursework first, a grade dial with a forecast range, what-if scenarios, and Notes as the class’s memory layer. It answers what needs attention rather than recording what already happened.
Aug 24, 2026
New mark, new face.
A four-petal symbol with its own five-colour palette, and Newsreader over Geist across the entire product. The logo animates its own layers in the hero — same artwork, moving.
Aug 20, 2026
Share an assignment with your classmates.
One group project, one shared task, and a private grade copy for every member. An accepted invite lands in the same class it was shared from.
Jul 20, 2026
The alpha gets a door.
An NDA gate at sign-in with an acceptance ledger behind it, a waitlist with a first-fifty bib tracker, and an interactive trailer on the landing page. Alpha means alpha.
Jul 15, 2026
Every AI path has a ceiling.
Per-user hourly limits on syllabus extraction, Pacer, subtask planning and recategorization. A runaway loop is our bill rather than yours — but it is also your latency, which is the real reason it gets a cap.
Jul 11, 2026
Syllabi go over whole.
A PDF is handed to Claude as a native document rather than scraped to text first, and the extraction schema tolerates one missing field instead of failing the entire read. Far fewer runs where the AI got distracted.
Jul 9, 2026
Launch-ready pass.
New logo, retention loops, an ICS feed for the calendar you already keep, and public class pages. The last of Supabase went out with it.
Jul 6, 2026
Attachments are back — and better.
Files now live on Convex storage: drag anything onto a task's attachment zone, it uploads directly and opens in one click. The migration pause is over.
Jul 6, 2026
Trust page + a demo path.
The whole data deal in plain English at /trust — including the cancel-in-two-clicks pledge, in writing before we charge a cent. And the landing page now offers a fully populated demo semester on first sign-in.
Jul 5, 2026
Overdue became a triage room.
Every late task now carries its verbs on the row — done, move to today, push a week — grouped by how far behind it is. Clearing the last one earns you a 'back in the pack' moment.
Jul 4, 2026
The on-pace streak.
Keep every deadline on the right side of the line and Today counts your run: 'On pace · day 6.' Let something go overdue and it quietly resets — the app already told you; no shame chip needed.
Jul 3, 2026
One green to rule them all.
Every 'done / all clear' signal now uses a single warm sage tuned to the paper palette, and completed timeline pills keep their category color instead of going grey. Small thing; the whole app feels calmer.
Jul 1, 2026
Motion, everywhere it matters.
Scroll reveals, count-up numerals, staggered lists, smooth expand/collapse, and a particle burst when you check a task off. All on one easing system, all respecting reduced-motion.
Jun 28, 2026
The school wall.
Twenty-three real university logos on the landing page, plus an honest impact row: one syllabus becomes 38 tasks in under a minute. Capability, not vanity metrics.
Want to run the next stretch with us? Start a semester and tell us what breaks.
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