Curling IO has been passwordless since Version 2. No passwords to remember, no passwords to steal, no password reset flows. You enter your email, we send you a short-lived login code, and you're in. It's been working well for over a decade, and for Version 3 we're keeping the same approach while fixing some rough edges and adding multi-email support.

But first, let's talk about why we made this controversial decision in the first place.

Curling IO serves hundreds of clubs across Canada, where English and French aren't optional, they're official languages. A club in Quebec needs a fully French experience. A national organization like Curling Canada needs both. Rails has mature i18n support and Version 2 has been fully bilingual from the start, but after a decade of maintaining around 10,000 YAML translation keys, we've hit the limits of what that approach can catch: missing keys, missing translations, and unused keys that accumulate silently over time.

In Version 3, we wanted compile-time guarantees that make those problems impossible. This post covers how we designed the i18n system, why we split it into two layers, and what we changed from Version 2.

We're building the next version of Curling IO - same features, same experience, stronger foundation. After over a decade of serving hundreds of curling organizations across Canada, the US, and internationally, we're investing in technical upgrades that set Curling IO up for the next 20+ years.

This is Part 1 of a series of technical posts documenting our journey and decisions as we build.