Built in a
Day

The Problem on the Table

Every week, my Bible study group went through the same ritual: someone printed out the week's reading plan and discussion questions, made enough copies for everyone, and handed them out before we sat down. People lost their sheets. People showed up without them. The plan that was supposed to keep us all on the same page lived on paper that, by the next week, nobody could find.

It's a small thing. But it's also the kind of small thing that quietly shapes whether a group stays consistent — and I kept thinking, in 2026, this shouldn't still be paper.

From Frustration to a Working App

I sat down on a Saturday with no plan beyond "what if this just lived on everyone's phone." By the end of that day, it did. A simple app where the weekly reading plan, discussion questions, and notes all live in one place — easy to update, easy to share, impossible to leave on the kitchen counter.

What struck me wasn't just the speed. It was that the gap between noticing a problem in my own life and having a real, usable solution for it had collapsed to a single afternoon. No backlog, no roadmap, no "let's revisit this next quarter." Just: here's the problem, here's the fix, here it is in your hands by dinner.

More Than Just Readings

Once the readings were in place, it became obvious the same idea applied everywhere paper still ruled: Mass times, the formation schedule, anything the group needed to find at a glance instead of digging through a stack of handouts.

Built for Light and Dark

Since this app was an extension of the same design system as this site, dark mode came along for free — and for a group that often checks the schedule late at night before bed, it mattered more than I expected.

What It Means to Build for Your Own Community

As a woman in tech, I'm used to building for users I'll never meet — personas, segments, cohorts. This was different. I was building for people I sit across from every week, who would tell me directly, in person, the next time we met, whether it actually helped. That immediacy changed how I designed: less about anticipating edge cases, more about solving the one real thing in front of me, well.

It also reminded me why I got into this work in the first place — not the processes or the roadmaps, but the moment a tool quietly makes someone's life a little easier, and they don't even think about it twice.

Looking Ahead

The app is small on purpose. But it's already changed how our group shows up each week — and it's a reminder that the tools to solve the problems right in front of us are closer than they've ever been. Sometimes the most meaningful thing you can build isn't the next big feature for work. It's the thing that didn't exist yesterday, for the people you actually know.