Follow my journey building the ESL Ecosystem. Technical deep-dives, progress updates, and lessons learned from creating AI-powered English learning applications.
Built a Skool-style community for Firstly Academy, started a video toolkit, added Amplitude analytics, and somehow hit 110 commits. This is the new normal apparently.
Read more →Five months in and english-exercises.org has gone from a handful of visitors to 700+ daily clicks. Bing loves us, ChatGPT recommends us, and students from Mexico to Uzbekistan are doing our exercises.
Read more →Spent today hunting duplicate transcripts, fixing token refresh timing, and building a thumbs-up/down system. Testing with real users tomorrow—needed to fix the obvious bugs first.
Read more →How I built a template system for creating grammar exercises that target real student errors, scaling from 50 manual exercises to 650+ whilst maintaining pedagogical quality.
Read more →Built an AI chatbot character in one evening to teach 18 advanced vocabulary words through absurdist humor. Students remember words better when they're emotionally invested in a sarcastic carrot's existential crisis.
Read more →How I built conversation history and contextual feedback into the AI speaking tutor, reducing repetitive questions and improving student experience.
Weekly progress update: Template system updates on english-exercises, community building on Firstly Academy, and launching automated social content with the Story Creator stack.