A quick thank you to the HealthLog developer

[HercoGC]

I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you for the enormous amount of work that has gone into HealthLog. @MBombeck

I have recently been setting up and testing the application and have raised several bugs and improvement suggestions along the way. From my own app-building experience, I understand how it can feel when you believe an application is working well and then someone arrives with a list of things they have encountered. Please know that my reports are not intended as negative criticism. I am raising them because I appreciate what you have built and would like to help make it even stronger.

When people test my own applications, I genuinely value thoughtful feedback because real-world use often reveals situations that are difficult for a developer to anticipate. I hope my feedback can be received in that same constructive spirit. I will continue trying to provide clear reproduction steps, workarounds and possible solutions where they are useful, while recognising that not every suggestion will fit the project's priorities or design decisions.

I also appreciate how much work happens behind the scenes in an open-source project: development, documentation, security, compatibility, releases and supporting users. HealthLog is an ambitious and thoughtfully designed application, and making it available for people to self-host is genuinely valuable.

In the near future I will create a fork and test some of suggestions fixes before giving feedback. Hope I can provide some level of contribution. I am a health fanatic and have been looking for an open source project like this for a long time.

Thank you again for your hard work and for being open to feedback. It is very much appreciated.

Herco

[MBombeck]

@HercoGC, I owe you a reply, and an apology for how late it is. I read this the day you wrote it, and then convinced myself I had answered. I found it again today.

For the record, this is what your testing turned into: twelve reports between the 6th and the 13th of August, and every one of them closed by the 29th. Some were small. Some were not: the Apple Health ZIP parser blowing past a 1 GB container, the Health Score failing on two pillars because a query selected fields that did not exist, PDFs invisible to search under one provider. None of that read as a list of complaints. It read as two and a half weeks of the project getting better faster than it would have on its own.

You wrote that you know how it feels when someone arrives with a list. It felt like someone cared enough to write one. I built this for myself and never expected other people to use it this seriously, let alone sit down and test it the way you did. That still surprises me, and it is the best part of doing this in the open.

If you do fork and try fixes, send them. I merge as merge commits so the authorship stays yours, and the release notes name the people who contributed. Thank you, really.