This blog starts today,with the whole story so far

Why I'm starting a blog, not just release notes

I've been writing these updates for a few days now, one detailed post per real milestone, because I think a mother trusting Mommy Refuel with her tiredness and her notes deserves more than a version number. Today I'm giving that habit an actual home: a blog, live on mommyrefuel.com, built into the site itself rather than bolted on somewhere else.

It's not only about product updates, though. I want this to be a place worth reading even on a day when nothing shipped.

What you'll find here

Three kinds of writing will live on this blog, and each one has its own honest label so you always know what you're reading:

• Wellbeing articles — practical, careful writing that follows the whole arc a reader might be on: planning a pregnancy, being pregnant, the newborn months, the years after, all the way through parenting older children into adulthood. Written by the Mommy Refuel team, grounded in reputable sources, never diagnostic.
• Research and gear — pieces that look outward: what evidence actually says, and honest thinking about the practical things families use.
• Product updates — posts like this one. Written and signed by me, Serhii, in first person, with a strict rule: only honest statuses, no invented numbers, no testimonials. If something is in TestFlight, I say TestFlight. If it's beta, I say beta.

Two languages, from day one, not as an afterthought

Mommy Refuel has shipped in 8 translated languages inside the app for a while, and I wasn't going to launch a blog that only spoke to half of that audience. Every post here exists in English and in Ukrainian from the moment it's published — and the Ukrainian isn't a literal translation of the English. When I write a founder post, I write the Ukrainian version the way I'd actually say it, not the way a translator would render my English.

How it actually works, briefly

Each post is a structured file with an English and a Ukrainian version, and a small generator builds it into the live site: an index page, category pages, author pages, individual post pages with proper structured data so search engines and AI answer engines can understand what they're reading, correct canonical and language links between the English and Ukrainian versions, Open Graph tags for sharing, RSS feeds for both languages, and an entry in the sitemap I spent part of this week fixing. None of that matters to you as a reader day to day — but it's the difference between writing that gets found and writing that quietly disappears.

I also linked the blog from the main menu and footer across every one of the site's 9 locale variants, and added a card for it on the resources page, so it's not a hidden corner of the site.

Also this week: sharing Mommy Refuel more widely

Alongside the blog, I spent this week putting together Mommy Refuel's first real Instagram presence — a full set of feed posts, carousels and Stories built from the same visual system as the app and the site, plus a lightweight, self-owned pipeline to render and update that artwork without depending on any third-party design tool. Publishing itself runs on our own backend, on a schedule, rather than a third-party scheduler. It's the same principle as everything else here: build the pieces we own, keep them simple, and keep them honest about what they are — marketing content, clearly separate from anything in the app that touches your health or your journal.

Where and when

• 2026-09-21, 12:05–16:49 — Instagram launch content set built: a server-side auto-posting pipeline on our existing backend (commit 1cc6407), the rendered feed and carousel images (959c9d1), Story and content-plan artwork (7abf256, ae0da23), a self-contained, ops-owned re-render pipeline with no third-party design tool dependency (4954fa2, d8d1115), and a realistic device-mockup style applied across every device post and Story (78a41e7, 7db906a).
• 2026-09-21, 20:33 – 2026-09-21, 21:21 — Feed post and carousel format finalised at 4:5 (1080×1350) per the social media spec, after a brief revert and correction (1d9f884, 40b2000, 09ce88c).
• 2026-09-22, 22:03 — The blog itself shipped to mommyrefuel.com: the post generator, English and Ukrainian post pages, category and author pages, RSS feeds, sitemap entries, and navigation links added across every locale, together with the first set of editorial articles (commit bb279bc).

What's next

More founder posts like this one, written as things actually ship, rather than batched into occasional summaries. More wellbeing writing, at a pace that respects how long good writing actually takes. And I'll keep holding this blog to the same rule as the app itself: honest statuses, no invented numbers, and nothing here that reads like marketing dressed up as fact.