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 →The April follow-up made the useful sequence much clearer: before the 14-page SEO test, during the test, and after the sitewide rollout to 834 exercise pages, the numbers kept moving in the same direction.
21 commits across voice-platform, database, Free-English, Lesson Planning, the portfolio, and Firstly Academy. The week was mostly about foundations: a new voice platform repo, stricter database governance, better grammar discovery, analytics salvage, and finally a cleaner explanation of what I actually do.
37 commits across english-exercises.org, lesson-planning, the portfolio, and Firstly Academy. The main pattern was verify, fix, verify again until the common-error workflow stopped being flimsy.
Only 5 commits this week, which is probably what happens after a 725-commit sprint. Still, there was useful work in lesson-planning and a bit of reality-checking on the teaching system.
725 commits in one week. Mostly a massive FCE corpus sprint in english-exercises.org, plus new review-homework tooling and a few useful quality-of-life upgrades elsewhere.
91 commits split between public-facing Business English work on english-exercises.org and a fairly aggressive clean-up of Firstly Academy's routing and auth layer.
On February 27, 2026 I ran a controlled SEO enrichment test on 14 grammar exercise pages. By March 15 they were improving about twice as fast as the rest of the site, which was enough to roll the pattern out everywhere.
31 commits. Not a huge number, but the week was dense: new grammar modules on english-exercises.org and a proper debrief workflow in lesson-planning so student roadmaps stop living in my head.
32 commits. Mostly english-exercises.org SEO work, some analytics pruning, and yes, I really did ship a floating popup telling people not to press it.
30 commits this week, but a lot of them were the kind that stop weird behaviour before users even realise there was a problem.
108 commits and most of them went into Impossible English, which started as a silly idea and ended the week as a proper game with XP, analytics, audio, and far too much polish.
108 commits and a more pedagogical kind of progress: the first article module landed, word-order exercises got grammar-coloured tiles, and I finally stopped the sound effects from shouting at people.
97 commits. The big one was Fluency Gym going from a rough concept to an actual product surface: schema, audio pipeline, APIs, frontend, mockups, the lot.
112 commits split between shipping a full Subject-Verb Agreement module on english-exercises.org and cleaning up the sort of UX issues that quietly make people bounce.
140 commits, mostly on the boring but necessary layer between features and actual usability: progress tracking across grammar hubs, a cleaner teacher workspace, and Scribe flows that make more sense.
119 commits across Firstly Academy and english-exercises.org, mostly spent removing friction: Fluency Gym got a cleaner flow, anonymous progress stopped leaking into the database, and I finally admitted sign-in was not ready yet.
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.