A personal growth companion for readers, shipped solo to App Store and Google Play. I designed, built, and maintained every layer of it.
Lampstand lets readers upload books, set goals, track habits, and surface insights from what they consume. The entire product — from idea to production — was one person.
I designed the UX, built the app in React Native with Expo, and handled App Store and Google Play submission end to end. The goal was a reading companion that felt calm and purposeful, not another productivity tool demanding attention.
Building solo means no one else catches your mistakes. Every architectural decision compounds over months. I kept the dependency surface deliberately small: one local database, one state manager, one navigation library — each chosen to last, not to be fashionable.
Reader data — books, notes, streaks — lives on device first. No account required to get value. The sync layer was designed later, not retrofitted into a cloud-dependent core.
Strategy, design, implementation, testing, and submission in one person. It forced clarity: every feature had to earn its place because the cost of building it wrong was mine alone.
Streaks and goals are easy to fake with optimistic UI. Lampstand uses a write-ahead log so that session data survives app crashes and backgrounding, and the progress a user sees is always real.
Lampstand taught me what it means to own a product completely. The discipline of shipping alone carries into every team I join.