Write-It-Down

The problem

My first App Store release, built because existing notes apps didn't match how I think visually. The deliberately unglamorous scope — a notes app — was the point: it forced engagement with the hard, boring problems that tutorials skip.

What made it non-trivial

• A custom rich-text editor. Text editing is famously where iOS abstractions run out; building one from scratch meant owning selection, attributes, and keyboard behavior directly.
• Offline-first with real sync. CoreData as the local source of truth, Supabase real-time sync over the network — the classic conflict between "always works" and "always current," resolved deliberately.
• Adaptive layouts across iPhone and iPad from one codebase.

Built with a mentor

This wasn't a project I figured out alone, and that's part of what made it formative. Zev Eisenberg — a staff engineer at The New York Times, and now a close friend — helped me build it, and more importantly, he showed me what good taste in iOS code looks like. He introduced me to type-safe navigation modeled with enums and pointed me to Point-Free, whose episodes on stateful navigation I worked through while building this app. Those ideas outlived the project: the navigation patterns in everything I've shipped since trace back to those conversations.

Outcome

Shipped through App Store review with 200+ downloads. More importantly, it established the end-to-end habit — product decision to store listing — that every project since has compounded on.