SquareCat
Where to put a castle gate
A small placement bug in a browser game, and the rule we chose so it stays fixed on every level.
A saved card is a link, not a copy
How we gave CertBrain and Finance Brain learners a My cards collection without letting them write cards, and why the saved card points at the original instead of copying it.
New art for a game, without touching the game
How Braineos's Tower Defense swapped placeholder circles for castle art: a drawing-only change, one module of SVG path data, and two surprises along the way.
Badges without counters: awarding achievements from data we already had
How we added tiered badges to Braineos with one new table, no stored progress counters, and a backfill that had to share a database with three live sites.
Lessons in steps, and text that reads your way
How we split CertBrain and Finance Brain lessons into steps without touching a word of their content, and added reader text settings that never flash the wrong size on load.
Shipping a web game as its own Android app, from code we already had
How Brain Defense went from a canvas game on braineos.com to its own Play Store app, reusing the game's rules byte for byte and rebuilding only what the phone needed.
Learner analytics from data you already have
How we gave Braineos learners a Progress page and profile totals without a schema change, a chart library or a single estimated number.
Balancing a tower defense game where gold comes from flashcards
How we turned an old idle tower defense prototype into a quiz game for Braineos, and used a headless bot to tune it so knowing the cards wins and ignoring them loses.
CertBrain is on Google Play: the third app from one mobile codebase
CertBrain's Android app is live. The third app built from one React Native codebase was mostly configuration, plus one new feature, a diagnostic you can take before you sign in.
Scoring exam readiness from spaced repetition
How we turned Leitner review boxes into a per-domain readiness score for CertBrain, why one weak domain blocks "ready", and the cramming bug we had to fix first.
Finance Brain is on Google Play: one React Native app, two store listings
Finance Brain's Android app is live. Here's how one mobile codebase now builds two apps with their own names, icons and Play listings, and what we fixed on the way.
Introducing CertBrain: exam prep where every question has a source
CertBrain is our new study site for the AWS Certified AI Practitioner exam. Here's how a third product launched on the same platform, and why we treated the content as the hard part.
One codebase, several products
How we turned a flashcard app into a platform that launches focused learning sites, without forking the code or maintaining two apps.