DogWatch
Every morning my son and I walk to daycare through quiet streets.
We have one rule, his rule: when we see a dog, we stop and we look.
Some days we see the man with three St. Bernards. A woman with two Bernese Mountain Dogs. Last Friday she only had one. We looked worried.
“Tiberius is sick today. He will be around next week.”
When a big dog appears, my son kicks his legs and looks at me with an expression that says are you seeing this.
We do not care for small dogs.
We started keeping count. Three or more was a good start to the day.
But the question we could not shake: which route has the most dogs?
The Grid
The grid: six streets north-south, four avenues east-west. Street E is the main road. We can only cross it at the lights. Everything else is fair game.
Twelve valid routes from home to daycare, each shaped by where we can cross.
We had no data.
I needed a way to pick a random route, count dogs as I walked, and see the results later. The Garmin on my wrist could do all of it.
The Build
He was napping.
I wanted a Garmin app that would tell me which way to go, count dogs with up and down buttons for false positives or dogs deemed too small, and sync to a dashboard on my laptop.
Garmin apps are written in MonkeyC. MonkeyDo runs them. I chose Python and Django for the backend. The watch would sync through the Garmin Connect app.
The watch needed to pick a random route. We can only cross Street E at the lights on 4th and 2nd. Everything else is fair game. I mapped twenty-four possible routes.
I worked on the spec and tried to catch any edge cases, what happens when there's no connection? How do I know which leg of the route I'm on?
I fed it into Claude Code's planning mode. Reviewed. Then enabled yolo mode and let it run.
The app worked in the simulator on the first try. We adjusted fonts and configured ngrok so data could flow from watch to server.
I synced a test walk. The terminal lit up. The dashboard updated.
One kilometer. Ten dogs. Ten seconds.
Test data. Ten dogs in ten seconds would be a miracle, a stampede, or the best day ever.
The Walk
I deployed it to the Raspberry Pi that weekend and tested the sync one more time. Then we went on with our weekend.
Monday morning. First real test.
My son in the stroller. Watch on my wrist showing Route 1. Left for 200 metres.
We walked. I watched for dogs. He pointed at trees, birds, a crack in the sidewalk.
No dogs.
Not one.
The entire route, start to finish, and not a single dog. No St. Bernards. No Tiberius. No doodles. Not even the small ones we ignore.
I ended the walk. The watch synced. The dashboard updated.
Total walks: one. Total dogs: zero.