50 Languages and ~95,000 Pages
From 16 to 50 languages and everything we've hardened under the hood.
Hey folks!
A little over a week ago, I wrote about hitting 16 languages and 30,000 pages in the DeathNote library. That felt like a milestone.
Then we kept going.
The library now exists in 50 languages! Every single page has its own sitemap entry, correct OpenGraph locale, and canonical URL. Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew render right-to-left. Georgian uses its own script. Tamil, Bengali, and Thai all display natively.
This is not a marketing exercise. If you are planning for the end of your life and you speak Tamil or Icelandic or Welsh, you should be able to read about it in your language.
The 34 New Languages
Since the last post, we added:
Persian, Hebrew — Completing RTL support alongside Arabic. Three right-to-left languages, each with its own rendering behavior.
Vietnamese, Czech, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Swedish — One at a time, each through the full pipeline. Ukrainian was personal with millions of displaced families with urgent legacy planning needs.
Then the floodgates opened with Romanian, Greek, Danish, Finnish, Bosnian, Albanian, Catalan, Macedonian, Bengali, Estonian, Latvian, Filipino, Tamil, Swahili, Icelandic, Welsh, Afrikaans, Norwegian, Slovak, Bulgarian, Croatian, Thai, Malay, Lithuanian, Serbian, Slovenian, Georgian.
All of them. Same pipeline, same quality bar, same focus: Help more of our users and community members find our free service and use it for their friends, family, and loved ones (including all pets)!
It’s fun to think about our progress as well! Just 5 or 6 months ago we only had english and we shared a few thoughts about starting this process with Japanese and Spanish. Since then, we’ve gone so much farther.
What Else We Shipped
While the translation work was happening, we also did a round of behind-the-scenes hardening. This is the less flashy stuff that keeps the platform reliable when it actually matters.
Your check-in reminders got smarter. — The system that sends you “hey, check in” emails now uses deterministic keys to make sure you never get the same reminder twice, even if the system runs multiple times. If DeathNote sends you a reminder, it was intentional and it was exactly one.
Delivery got more durable. — When the time comes and your death note needs to be sent, that process now runs through a proper job queue. Each delivery attempt is tracked, retries are automatic, and nothing gets lost between steps. The system knows exactly what was sent, what is pending, and what needs another try.
The editor protects your work. — The note editor now warns you before you navigate away with unsaved changes. It also handles page reloads gracefully so you do not lose what you were writing. Small thing, big deal when you are composing the most important message you will ever write.
We audit ourselves. — We ran a full internal audit on everything -- cron job reliability, notification paths, webhook handling, database security boundaries, test coverage. Found a few rough edges, fixed them all, and documented the patterns so future work follows the same standards.
Making our system more robust for the long-term is the goal. And every week we’re creating small performance gains that ultimately bring value to our users.
Iteration by iteration. Step by step.
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