Diaper Duty Tracker

As a new parent and a developer who lives in the terminal, I ran into a recurring problem: my wife would ask, “When was the baby’s last diaper change?” and I’d often draw a blank. For a newborn, this is a crucial piece of information. I realized I could solve my own problem with the skills I was learning, and so the Diaper Duty Tracker was born.

This project is a command line application built with Go, designed to be a fast, efficient, and user friendly way for parents to track their baby’s needs right from the terminal.

Core Features

The initial version of the application is a complete, standalone CLI tool with a full set of features:

• Interactive Setup: A one time init command to create a profile for your baby.
• Smart Logging: Quickly log a diaper change, with flags to specify a past time (-t "2:30PM") or add notes (-n "...").
• Instant Status: The status command provides an immediate summary of the last change and calculates when the next one is due based on the baby’s age.
• Daily History: The history command gives a clean overview of all changes logged for the day.
• Easy Configuration: Users can override the smart defaults and config a custom reminder interval.

Technical Stack

My goal was not just to build a script, but to build a professional, maintainable application. The technology choices reflect this:

• Go & Cobra: Go was the perfect choice for creating a fast, single binary executable that runs natively on any OS. The Cobra library provided a powerful framework for building a feature rich and user friendly CLI.

• SQLite & sqlc: I chose SQLite as the database because it’s embedded, meaning it runs within the application process without needing a separate server. This makes the application completely self contained. To interact with it, I used sqlc to generate fully type safe Go code from my raw SQL queries, which eliminated boilerplate and prevented common runtime errors.

• Goose & Embedded Migrations: To manage the database schema, I used Goose. In a major architectural improvement, I embedded the SQL migration files directly into the Go binary using //go:embed. The application runs these migrations automatically on initialization, providing a zero setup experience for the end user. They don’t need external .sql files or a separate migration tool to get started.

• Smart & Robust File Handling: Initially, the app stored its data in the current directory. I quickly evolved this to a more robust solution where the database is stored in a dedicated folder in the user’s home directory (~/.diaper-duty/). This allows the application to be installed globally via go install and run from anywhere on the system without permissions issues.

Future Plans

This initial version lays a solid foundation. The next major step is to evolve the application’s architecture by building a background API server and a simple, mobile friendly Web UI. This will allow non technical users (like my wife!) to use the tracker from their phone’s web browser, while the CLI remains fully functional for developer users like me.

You can check the repo here: github.com/babanini95/diaper-duty