Welp. I guess we're leaving Vercel...

d'y'all like my icons? we are doing a UX pass looking at navigation, discoverability of features, hinting at happy paths, etc. And icons are always a favourite topic to nerd out about with your designer pals :))

update! limited chat feature is live :)) we're making sure the flashcards stay the main character, so for now you can just send each other cards and accept/ignore them. let's see how it goes!

Not me finally implementing the chat feature I've been putting off for ages....

We are doing testing with our first users, and taking inspo from old Tumblr posts 😇🤗🧄🥦

Wait, this is Sunlo's business plan... is that ... is that not how you do it?

Question for the #microcopy nerds out there:
"Choose a deck" vs. "Choose a language" ?
"Start a new language" vs. "Start a new deck" ?

Is one more concrete than the other? Is one more natural than the other? Is one easier to understand?

Microcopy is a subtle art and we're still learning!

psst -- if you only have 1 person on your team and no office and on tuesdays you go to a local board game studio for their coworking day, it's okay to say stuff like "Tuesday is our no-meetings day here at the Sunlo offices/campus/HQ"

(Sunlo will use language processing tools like tokenising and vectorising to categorise HUMAN-MADE flashcards and create "smart playlist" style sets of cards to add to your deck, but every flashcard, phrase, and translation will be written by people, for people.)

👀👀👀
(Sunlo will never use AI-generated slop to try to teach you a language)
👀👀👀

Obviously with a pure DIY flashcards app you can do any language to any set of translations, but Sunlo will be the first app I've seen that is truly any-to-any (and any-to-many) and still offers a kind of structure for learners to get started using curated public resources. I hope it works!

Actually this is something I think is pretty neat about our flash card model: if you're learning Hindi and you speak French and English, Hindi phrases that have translations into both languages will show both translations, which can help with comprehension when the structures and grammars differ.

The app uses user-generated content to populate the flash card library so it can support any language to/from any other language as long as we have users. But from the start we'll be focusing on seed content for English speakers to learn Hindi, Tamil, Spanish and French.

But ultimately these are just details the user shouldn't even have to know about. We hope the app is easy, intuitive, fun to use, and most importantly an effective tool for learning languages 🧄🥦

Second: the scheduler is dynamic so the user (or the client app) can select cards with different difficulty scores for more dynamic, adaptive user experiences, such as giving the user an easier card if they've been struggling, or testing out different mixes for their effect on session completion.

First, we wrote the scheduler entirely in Postgres as an RPC to record reviews and a view to fetch cards with their FSRS metadata attached. We hope to release our PLv8 implementation as an open source package in the future, if there's interest.

- invite friends and send them cards

We also wrote our own version of the FSRS (Spaced Repetition) algorithm, directly in Postgres using PLv8! Our version of the algo builds on the amazing work of the FSRS community to do a couple things I don't think others have done before:

After the last several months of building out the tech, we're finally getting close to a testable product! Sunlo should be ready for friends & family testing in May!

#BuildInPublic

Features include:
- create cards, add translations, curate your deck
- daily reviews with spaced repetition algo
...