Four weekly editions cover October, the month of Season 0. 159 changes merged across the app and the site in 27 days, carried by 18 production deploys. Season 0: Founding Heroes opened on October 1 with a trailer and an announcement mail. The knight on the logo was redrawn and reached every mail. Connecting Notion stopped opening on an empty week: starter habits come from your own columns, the template carries an example week and the Edit Habits screen was rebuilt from a phone. Private habits, honest completion rates for weekly habits and a widget that knows when it is disconnected followed. The last week of October, with the season's finish line, opens the November editions.
The month, week by week
Changes merged per weekly edition. The month grew week over week up to the heavy weekend of October 17 and 18, then held.
What defined the month
Seven arcs, distilled from four weeks of shipping.
Season 0 opened
Season 0: Founding Heroes opened on Thursday, October 1. The trailer went out in three cuts, all from the same automated recording that drives the demo. Notion Habit Heroes got a YouTube channel for it. The announcement went to everyone with a verified address, in three variants: a reconnect note, a join note and a register note for the waitlist. The season showed as running a day early, because the activation check asked the easternmost time zone on earth. The displayed state now derives from the start date itself. Connected users who were not in the season got a one-click join on the connect card and on the home page. Since October 4 a first Notion connect enrols you in the running season automatically. Duel results name a forfeit instead of reading like a bug.
The knight, redrawn and everywhere
The knight on the shield was redrawn by hand, with cleaner curves and an open gap between arm and torso, then moved to the optical centre of the shield. One source file now produces every logo variant: header, favicon, the app icons of the home-screen widget, every social preview card. A week later the mails followed with the same mark. Later in the month the mark was cut tight for Notion's icon field and a round avatar was made for the Marketplace creator profile.
A first connect that is not empty
Connecting Notion used to open on a blank week. October closed that gap from several sides. The connect step reads the habit columns your journal database already has and seeds the configuration from them. The public template carries seven example pages, one per weekday, rolled forward every night and moved to the trash in your copy when you connect. People who connected but never ticked a habit get a one-time reminder three to fourteen days later. Confirming your email can send you straight to the connect page. A database at the top level of the workspace gets an explanation and a manual way to place the widget instead of a failed embed. The widget's Edit Habits screen was rebuilt around fifteen findings from a phone in the Notion app: rows that fit at every width, one button size, renaming in the row header, a controls row with the add form and the week-start picker.
The widget learned its state
Two phone screenshots fixed the widget's embed under 600 pixels: a header that trims instead of overlapping, a short tab label, a leaderboard that fits. Competitions can be created and left from inside the widget. Each habit has a Private checkbox. A private habit never appears when someone opens your profile from a leaderboard, in a comparison, in a group roster or as the subject of a duel. The widget knows when the account behind it is disconnected or gone: a read-only mode with a reconnect link, a banner with a path to a fresh link, the demo instead of a blank. Weekly habits got lifetime period counters, so the completion rate on the back of a streak card means something.
Fewer wrong numbers, fewer lost nights
Competition leaderboards drop rows at zero points, except your own. Midnight tasks survive a deploy that lands at the wrong minute: a sweep every five minutes picks up any overdue task, so the database row is the source of truth and the timer only a punctuality aid. Two journal pages for the same date resolve to the one with the most activity. Existing duplicates heal on the next sync. When a connection breaks, the mail tells a page in the trash from a database that no longer answers. The streak calculation treats a day whose totals were never written as zero. The home page's mobile speed score recovered from a build-tool update that had preloaded all eight web fonts. Scheduling the first nightly sync now runs after the connect has been committed, not inside it.
The site, read as a newcomer
A usability sweep darkened the main purple one notch for contrast, underlined text links again and enlarged the footer's tap targets. Then one prose link style replaced a dozen local copies. The roundup of free Notion habit tracker templates was re-verified live and grew to twelve rows, linked from the home page and nine guides. Three new pages explain the widget, progress bars in a Notion habit tracker and tracking habits with friends. Signup gained a newsletter checkbox. The FAQ is plain about what disconnecting does and does not touch. The site now states in one sentence what Notion Habit Heroes is: a social habit tracker that runs on your own Notion database.
Under the hood
Seven changes toward tracking without a Notion database landed behind a switch that stays off until a full rehearsal has passed. Draft previews of the site can talk to the server, so a change can be checked with a real login before it ships. The deploy pipeline deploys production only when a change asks for it. Preview builds skip changes that do not touch the site. Dependency updates land grouped, once a week. The site's stylesheets turned 169 hard-coded colours into design tokens. Design source files were moved out of the build after they made a deploy time out. The release tooling can publish the server image to a second registry behind a vulnerability scan gate. A runbook for day-to-day production work was written down. Two small backlog tools arrived, one that reports overlapping items and one that keeps a deleted item's number from being reused. This log's own date window was fixed so a merge late on the start day no longer slips between editions.
Distilled from the four weekly ship-log editions covering September 28 to October 24, 2026. The weeks in full: October 4 · October 11 · October 18 · October 25. The week of October 25 to 31, with Season 0's finish line, opens the November editions.