The person behind it

Alen Yaco

I built CalorieCounter. Before I wrote software, I wrote surgical notes: a year in hospice care at Kaiser Permanente, then the surgical side of two vascular practices in Los Angeles and Laguna Woods. Everything on this site comes out of that combination, clinical documentation on one side, a self-taught engineering habit on the other.

Where I come from

My first job in health care was a one-year hospice internship at Kaiser Permanente: patient records, coordinating with families, assembling and delivering care bags, supporting nurses at the bedside. It is the part of medicine where nobody oversells anything, and it shaped how I write about health.

From there I moved to vascular surgery. At West Regional Vascular Clinic in Los Angeles I was the medical scribe for arterial angiography and peripheral arterial and venous disease, writing every procedure and consult note for the lead surgeon. At Peripheral Vascular Clinic in Laguna Woods I ran the practice end to end: radiofrequency ablation, Varithena, and sclerotherapy cases, surgical table prep, inventory, scheduling, insurance, the front and back office, and hiring and training the team. Case volume grew from 80 a month to 300 while I was there.

I studied at Santiago Canyon College and transferred to the University of California, Irvine, for a double bachelor's in biological sciences and social ecology, class of 2026. Human biology and behavioral science are the foundation under everything I have built since.

What I build

I am the founder of ROID, a free iOS fitness and health social network with an AI health advisor at the center. It has 1,550 registered users, 250 to 300 people opening it daily, and 700 to 1,000 monthly actives, across an age range of 17 to 67. It took six App Store review cycles to get approved. I built it solo, from the first line of code.

CalorieCounter came out of the same work. Photo-based food logging is a small, sharp problem: people quit calorie apps because logging a meal takes minutes, and a number without its uncertainty is worse than no number at all. That is why this app labels every item Pretty sure, Best guess, or Check this, and why the blog will never publish an accuracy percentage.

No computer science degree and no engineering team. To ship, I taught myself Swift and iOS, then backend, data science, retrieval systems for AI, payments, design, App Store release, and growth marketing. The whole stack is still mine.

What I write about here

• How photo logging actually works, what it gets right, and where it needs a second look.
• Nutrition research in the news, read the way a scribe reads a chart: study design, sample size, funding, and what the authors admit they do not know.
• Food data, where the numbers come from, and why two apps disagree about the same sandwich.
• Building a health product without ads, data sales, or shame as a feature.

Everything here is reporting and product explanation, not medical advice. I am not your clinician, and posts that touch health say so plainly.

Teaching

ROID is an internship partner with California State University, Fullerton. Business and marketing students intern with me for course credit. I scope their projects, mentor them through real growth and marketing work, and run the recruiting, interviewing, and scheduling behind it.

Take accountability. No one is going to hand it to you. If you want it done, learn and do it yourself. Doing it the hard way pays off.

From my UCI ANTrepreneur Center interview, January 2026.

Elsewhere

• LinkedIn
• ROID, the app I run
• support@thecaloriecounterapp.com reaches me directly