Birthed

Every date has a hive.

Website · How the hive works · What it does not do · The objections, answered · Privacy · Report a vulnerability

---

Every calendar date has a page. It shows what happened on that date, who was born on it, what was number one, and the day's news, all in one pool. On the date itself, anyone who shows up gets three buzzes to spend on what they think will still matter. At midnight the hive seals, and it can never be edited. Next year the same date opens a new one, and the old one stays readable.

Birthed is a website at birthed.app and an iPhone app in beta on TestFlight, Apple's free app for trying apps before they are on the store. The date is the thing, not the user. There is nothing to buy, no advertising, and no analytics service or third party code of any kind.

The website does not ask for an account and does not store your birthday. The month and day you pick only choose which page to show. A birth year, if you give one, lives in one cookie in your own browser and nowhere else. The iPhone app is different and says so: it sends a month, a day and an optional year to a silent anonymous account. The privacy page has the whole account, and it is edited in the same commit as the code.

Status, plainly

CLAUDE.md is the working record: every decision, why it was made, and what turned out wrong. It is blunt on purpose, and it is the first thing to read before changing anything.

What is not done

• The feed still reads like an encyclopedia. Tiles are whole Wikipedia sentences, and some rows are templates ("was the number one album"). docs/editorial-pass.md is the plan, and short headlines come with a rule written down first: shorten the source, never add to it.
• Nobody born before 1600 is in the database yet. The import reaches back to 1400 now, but it has not been run again, so there is no Leonardo, no Galileo and no Einstein until it is.
• The website knows a birth year and not a birthday. It treats the date being read as the reader's own, so on somebody else's date an age can be one year high.
• "Claimed" is still the only tier in practice. Nothing adds a second source to a story yet, so the three shades of honey on the board are one.
• The iPhone app has not been compiled in every session that changed it. CLAUDE.md says which rules have a test that has not been run.
• A migration in this repository can be newer than the live database. docs/going-public.md lists the ones that are.
• The reward catalog this started as is still here, unused. It is built in the schema and tested, and CLAUDE.md section 5 records why it was cut.

What it does not do

• It does not ask the website's readers to sign in, and it has no accounts to sign in to.
• It does not let a buzz be changed once it is cast, or a sealed hive be edited. The database trigger refuses both. The one exception written so far, taking a buzz back in its first thirty seconds, is in this repository and not yet on the live database.
• It does not send the device's location anywhere, or use it.
• It does not run a script on any page except /add, the private /admin pages, and the live hive of a date that is taking buzzes. web/test/serve.test.ts fails if any other page is allowed to.
• It does not send the list of birthdays you keep in the app anywhere. Only how many there are.
• It does not show a notification for a famous person's birthday. A notification is a promise that there is something to do.

What it looks like

How it fits together

The specifications are in docs/specs/: PRD.md (what the product is and refuses to be), SRS.md (numbered requirements) and SDS.md (the design). Large parts of all three describe the reward catalog, which is on the shelf. The decisions made since are in CLAUDE.md section 5, and they win where the two disagree.

How the hive works

Everything with a birthday on a date sits in one pool: that day's news, historical events, people born on it, and works released on it. The rules are in docs/the-wall.md, which is the authority for every rule below; the database enforces them in supabase/migrations/20260909040000_the_wall.sql and the migrations after it.

• A date opens the day before it happens, for submissions only.
• On its own day and the day after, a visitor gets buzzes to spend: three on the date itself, one on the day after. wall_boost_budget in the database is the only place that number lives.
• One tap is one buzz, and one story takes at most one buzz from one visitor.
• A tile's size on the board is its share of the date's buzzes. When nobody has buzzed, the panel's points decide, and one buzz beats every score. worker/src/wall/allocator.ts cuts the board; web/src/hive-allocator.ts is a plain JavaScript copy used by the live page, and a test holds the two to the same output on four hundred generated boards.
• At midnight United States Eastern time ending the day after the date, the date seals. wall_boosts is immutable: its trigger refuses every update and every delete. Migration 20260911010000_thirty_seconds_to_take_it_back adds one exception, a buzz taken back within thirty seconds of casting it on a date that has not sealed; as of September 21, 2026 that migration is in the repository and not on the live database.
• The same calendar date opens a new hive the following year. The old ones remain.

The worker's tick, worker/src/wall/tick.ts, runs every fifteen minutes. It files the date's imported history as stories, reads the public news feeds listed in worker/src/wall/news.ts, checks every cited source, and writes a snapshot of the board.

What happens to a reader's birthday

On the website, nothing is stored.

• The month and day a reader picks only choose which page to send them to. They are never written down. The /year handler in web/src/serve.ts answers the form.
• The birth year, if given, goes into one cookie in the reader's own browser and nowhere else. It turns on the song strip and the day counts. Choosing the blank option deletes it.
• The website has no accounts. Two pages run a script, /add and the live hive of a date currently taking buzzes; securityFor in web/src/serve.ts sets the content security policy per path and web/test/serve.test.ts asserts that no other path may run one. Every other page sends default-src 'none'.
• The iPhone app creates a silent anonymous account with a random token on first launch. AccountService.pushProfile sends a month, a day, an optional birth year and an optional typed region to that account. The list of other people's birthdays a reader adds never leaves the phone; only its length is sent, as people_added_count.
• The device's location is never used or sent.

The full account is on the privacy page, which is edited in the same commit as any code that changes what it describes.

Repository layout

Requirements

• Node 22. web/package.json and worker/package.json declare >=18.18.0; Render runs 22.
• A Swift 5.9 toolchain or newer, for swift test. Xcode 16 or newer to build the app.
• Docker, only to build the worker's container the way Render does.
• The Supabase command line interface, only to apply migrations.
• Python 3, only for ingestion/.

Building and running

The website

cd web
npm install
npm run site
npm run serve

npm run site compiles the TypeScript and bakes the 366 date pages into web/out/, which is not checked in. It reads the database through the anonymous key, so it needs SUPABASE_URL and SUPABASE_ANON_KEY in web/.env; web/.env.example shows the shape. npm run serve starts the process that serves those pages. npm run og shoots the share images with Playwright and needs a Chromium download.

The worker

cd worker
npm install
npm run build

The worker is a set of scripts, each a script in worker/package.json: import:day, import:all, import:songs, import:albums, import:films, import:events, import:culture, wall:seed, wall:news, wall:history, wall:check, wall:tick, pictures and others. Every one that writes needs the service role key in worker/.env; worker/.env.example shows the shape. The service role key bypasses row level security and must never appear in the app target or in web/.

The iPhone app

To try the built app without building it, join the beta on TestFlight. To build it, open Birthed.xcodeproj in Xcode. The app reads its two values from Birthed/Config/Secrets.swift, which is not checked in:

enum Secrets {
    static let supabaseURL = URL(string: "https://<project>.supabase.co")!
    static let supabaseAnonKey = "<anonymous key>"
}

The database

Migrations are applied with the Supabase command line interface, against a project you own. docs/going-public.md lists migrations in this repository that have been written and not applied to the live project.

Running the tests

cd web && npm test
cd worker && npm test
swift test

Each npm test compiles the TypeScript and runs node --test over the compiled test files. The web tests build a small site under web/test-site/ to serve it. swift test at the repository root compiles Birthed/Domain/ and BirthedTests/DomainTests/ through Package.swift, with no Xcode target. The app compiles the same domain files through the Xcode project. If a domain file ever imports a framework, swift test is what fails first.

How it is deployed

render.yaml describes two Render services in the Oregon region.

• birthed-web, a Node web service. Its build command installs dependencies, bakes the pages, and shoots the share images. It holds only the anonymous key. It rebuilds only when something under web/ changes, so a change that lives in the database needs a manual deploy from the Render dashboard, or the site keeps serving the pages it was built with.
• birthed-wall, a cron job built from worker/Dockerfile, running node dist/src/wall/tick.js every fifteen minutes. It holds the service role key. Nothing on birthed.app depends on it running; a tick that fails leaves the hive as it was.

The Edge Functions under supabase/functions/ are deployed with the Supabase command line interface.

Where the content comes from

• Names, birth and death years and one line descriptions of people come from Wikidata, under Creative Commons Zero. Every row records its source and license. Wikipedia article text is not used; docs/specs/SDS.md section 8.1 says why.
• Historical events come from Wikipedia's date articles, under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike, each with the page it came from.
• Chart weeks (the number one song, album and film) are parsed from Wikipedia's year lists, under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike, and every row carries the page it came from. The Hot 100 import begins with 1959; a 1958 birthday shows no song, because that year's page could not be read without guessing.
• Event pictures are freely licensed files from Wikimedia Commons, copied at tile width. News pictures are the publisher's own preview image, recorded as belonging to the publisher and removed on request.
• The day's news comes from the public feeds listed in worker/src/wall/news.ts.
• Facts found about a specific date are found by a model that searches, run as an Edge Function, and each fact shows the page it cites. A run that reports no searches is discarded.
• The Fraunces typeface is served from web/static/fonts/ under the SIL Open Font License, which is beside it.

Which record was number one on a given date is a fact and cannot be owned. Birthed is not affiliated with Wikipedia, Wikidata, the Wikimedia Foundation, Billboard, Penske Media or Google.

License

The code is under the GNU Affero General Public License version 3.0, in LICENSE. Content imported from Wikidata, Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons keeps the license of its source, recorded on every row.