Today I Learned is a small offline-first app (Expo + TypeScript, local SQLite) for jotting one thing you learn each day — private, no accounts. Its real purpose: making decision-making visible, with 81 logged decisions (each with alternatives and rationale) showing how much judgment shipping even a simple app takes.
Building even a "simple" app hides an enormous number of small decisions that usually go unrecorded. I wanted to make that invisible work visible — to see, concretely, how many choices it actually takes to ship something.
I built a deliberately small app (a calm offline-first "Today I Learned" journal inExpo + TypeScript), but treated the build itself as the experiment: every non-trivial choice was captured as an explicit decision — the options, the tradeoffs, and why I picked one — in a structured decision log.
Catching decisions as they happen, not after. Most get made on autopilot, so the work was slowing down enough to notice each fork — data model, navigation, reminders, even a divider line — and record it without grinding the build to a halt.
A finished app backed by 81 recorded decisions — each with the alternatives weighed and the reason for the pick — covering everything from data storage and navigation down to tag capitalization and a single divider line. It turns "I built an app" into a documented record of how and why, and makes concrete just how much judgment a small piece of software actually takes.