Penguin Nurse: An Open Source Approach to Health Tracking
Room B | Wed 21 Jan 10:45 a.m.–11:30 a.m.
Presented by
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Brian May
@penguin_brian@hachyderm.io
https://linuxpenguins.xyz/brian/
Brian May is a DevOps and software engineer with a passion for building reliable systems and elegant code.
By day, he wrangles Kubernetes clusters and streamlines CI/CD deployment processes (example).
By night, he experiments with personal software projects that explore new ideas and technologies.
Brian’s programming journey began with BASIC and Pascal on the Commodore 64, and today spans Elixir, Go, and his favorite language, Rust.
Outside of work and coding, he enjoys photography—especially capturing animals and birds at Healesville Sanctuary.
Despite the name, Brian May does not play the guitar—but he does enjoy composing resilient infrastructure and clean software.
Brian May
@penguin_brian@hachyderm.io
https://linuxpenguins.xyz/brian/
Brian May is a DevOps and software engineer with a passion for building reliable systems and elegant code. By day, he wrangles Kubernetes clusters and streamlines CI/CD deployment processes (example). By night, he experiments with personal software projects that explore new ideas and technologies.
Brian’s programming journey began with BASIC and Pascal on the Commodore 64, and today spans Elixir, Go, and his favorite language, Rust. Outside of work and coding, he enjoys photography—especially capturing animals and birds at Healesville Sanctuary. Despite the name, Brian May does not play the guitar—but he does enjoy composing resilient infrastructure and clean software.
Abstract
There are countless apps for recording personal health data—Samsung Health, Google Fit, Apple Fitness, Oura, Soundcore, mySymptoms Food Diary, and many more. But most come with the same set of limitations: your data is locked into a vendor’s cloud, tied to a single device, only exportable through tedious manual steps, or restricted to the metrics the app’s authors consider important. The result? I found myself juggling multiple trackers—one for food, one for exercise, one for bathroom habits, and so on—with no way to connect the dots.
So I built my own. Penguin Nurse is an open-source health tracker that gives full control of data storage, letting users choose their own PostgreSQL database backend. Built with Rust and the Dioxus framework, it runs as a full-stack application and is designed to be flexible, transparent, and extensible.
This talk will explore why I created Penguin Nurse, how it’s built, what it can (and can’t) do today, and where it’s heading next. Also: there will be photos of birds.
There are countless apps for recording personal health data—Samsung Health, Google Fit, Apple Fitness, Oura, Soundcore, mySymptoms Food Diary, and many more. But most come with the same set of limitations: your data is locked into a vendor’s cloud, tied to a single device, only exportable through tedious manual steps, or restricted to the metrics the app’s authors consider important. The result? I found myself juggling multiple trackers—one for food, one for exercise, one for bathroom habits, and so on—with no way to connect the dots.
So I built my own. Penguin Nurse is an open-source health tracker that gives full control of data storage, letting users choose their own PostgreSQL database backend. Built with Rust and the Dioxus framework, it runs as a full-stack application and is designed to be flexible, transparent, and extensible.
This talk will explore why I created Penguin Nurse, how it’s built, what it can (and can’t) do today, and where it’s heading next. Also: there will be photos of birds.