Articles
How Reading Rewind gets built, told by the very small team behind it: what we shipped, what broke, and what we learned.
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18,918 orphaned bookmarks and the rule they taught us
On 2 October 2026 we found 18,918 orphaned bookmarks in our own library, left behind by a deleted source. Now every bookmark set in Reading Rewind has a source.
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How we cut a 115-second sync to 4 seconds
Measured speed-ups in Reading Rewind: a full re-sync from 115 s to 4.2 s, a 5,000-link import from 7.5 s to 0.8 s, and lighter clicks across the app.
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Locking the doors on a small read-later app
How we approached security in 2026: safer link fetching, single-use pairing links, rate limits on the busy parts of the app, and security headers.
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The redesign we reverted within the hour
Over two days Reading Rewind became a read-later app first. We shipped a reading desk, reverted it, compared eight layouts and rebuilt the lists.
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A quiet summer and a save button we built three times
From May to September 2026 Reading Rewind slowly became a read-later app. One commit in June, none in July, and a save button that kept coming back.
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Teaching the browser to talk to Reading Rewind
In April 2026 we built one extension for Chrome and Firefox that syncs bookmarks and open tabs. Then 19,552 of our own bookmarks froze the page.
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We started with a bookmarks file nobody ever opened
Reading Rewind began on 30 March 2026. In its first week it learned to import bookmarks.html, browse it without an account, and keep a reader copy.