I built the apps I use every day
I wanted to improve my English, so I built my own app to practise. Then I made a design kit so all my apps look the same, and now I use four apps I built myself every day.
First of all, I have always wanted to improve my English. I think it's a beautiful language (and it's the most spoken language in the world). So I thought, why don't I create an app that helps me improve my English?
I started building it, and I looked up the methods that actually work, like shadowing, listening and writing, and I added them to my app. That app became Wordwise.
But as soon as I started, there was a problem: what style should this app have? I didn't want to spend hours deciding which style was best, or thinking about buttons, text and so on. So I created my own UI design, a kit for all my apps.
The kit is built around Libron , made for long reading, I found in Youtube. Each app only changes six colours (paper, ink and accent, for light and dark mode), and my coding agent has the kit as a skill, so when I say "use my design", every app gets the same look.
A few years ago, even a small app took weeks of setup before anything useful worked. Now I describe what I want to an AI coding agent, it writes the code, and I review and test it. Each project has an
AGENTS.md file with its rules, so the agent never forgets them. These are the four apps I use every day:
| App | What it does |
|---|---|
| Wordwise | Texts at my level on topics I choose, with audio and a vocabulary log |
| Personal wiki | Markdown notes (like obsidian but more personalize) |
| Pomodoro | A study timer where a dog waits for its treat |
| Portfolio | My Portfolio |
The hard part isn't the code anymore. It's knowing exactly what you want.
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