Founder Portal

I used to love YouTube and X for learning, but I wanted less of the distraction that came with them. Creating a substitute has helped me cut out social media: a private website that brings together information I choose, what I’m studying, and ideas I want to return to.

The Founder Portal gives me a place to read, listen, track learning, and reflect. My interest in e-ink is part of the same effort to change my relationship with technology. Continual study, managing stress, and living a holistic wellness lifestyle matter to me, and I want the environment I spend time in to reflect those values.

Now that I can build software much more quickly, I can keep adapting these tools as I learn from using them. The aim is to create positive feedback loops between what I study, what I practice, and what I build next.

The portal runs on my personal VPS rather than on my Mac. In it I can listen to a book, turn a passage into a short practice conversation, rehearse how I explain my projects, and get feedback that quotes what I actually said. The same server runs the coding agents that do much of my building.

Choosing what I read

My library holds the books, courses, podcasts, videos and posts I’ve chosen. I can search it, mark a source in progress, up next, set aside or finished, and pick up where I stopped. I also built a custom X feed that ranks posts from lists of accounts I chose, so I could read them in my own interface instead of X’s app. It’s paused for now. Posts I share from X on my phone still go into my library, many with the full article.

My library filtered to Articles and posts: a search field, tabs for All, In progress, Up next, Set aside and Finished, and posts saved from X, most marked Full article, each with an Open button. — Posts I saved from X on my phone in October, under Articles and posts in my library. The tabs above them show what’s in progress, up next, set aside or finished.

Studying a book

Here’s how studying works, using a book I’ve been working through: Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff. The screenshots from here on come from a demo copy of the portal. When I open Pitch Anything, the audio plays with a transcript that follows along, and the cards made from it are one tab away. Each card is tied to the passage it came from, so I can go from a card back to that moment in the book. Agents draft new cards from my notes, and I keep the ones I want. Wherever I stop listening, the book picks up there on my phone, my Mac or my e-ink tablet.

Pitch Anything open in the study app: an audiobook of 6 hours 15 minutes with 12 cards, buttons for Practise this passage and Review 12 cards, a player at 20:00 with Position synced, the transcript, and the current passage with Copy for discussion. — Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff in the study app, at 20:00. Practise this passage turns the current passage into practice.

Practicing a passage

From the transcript, I can turn a passage into practice. I either explain its idea to an AI colleague who hasn’t read the book or apply it in a short role-play, and I set the goal, the situation and what counts as doing it well. Those criteria are what the feedback measures me against later.

Practice setup for the passage selected at 26:02 to 26:05: Explain it is chosen over Apply it, with editable fields for the goal, the situation and what counts as doing it well, difficulty and length options, and a Prepare practice button. — Setting up practice for the passage at 26:02, with Explain it chosen and the goal, situation and criteria open to edit.

Preparing for interviews

The same tool is where I prepare for interviews. Practice starts by asking what I’m preparing for: an interview, explaining one of my projects, a passage from something I’m studying, or a sales conversation. For an interview, I first list true examples from my own work. The interviewer and the feedback draw only on those, so what I rehearse stays true to what I’ve actually done.

The Practice page asking What do you want to practise, with four choices: Prepare for an interview, Explain a project, Practise from a source and Rehearse a sales conversation, each with a one-line description. — The Practice page starts with what I’m preparing for. Each choice opens its own setup.

Explaining a project starts from an outline prepared from the project’s own records: how it works, what failed and the tradeoff, and what the evidence shows. What I personally did is left for me to answer. I describe the project in writing or out loud. An AI interviewer then follows up the way an engineer would, with questions such as what proves the work reached production.

A 90-second outline for explaining an Overlap repair, in four parts: Open, Explain the repair, Describe the tradeoff and Finish with proof. Below it are sections for How it works, What failed and the tradeoff, What the evidence shows, and Your part (only you can answer this). — The outline for explaining a fix I shipped in Overlap: the opening, the repair, the tradeoff and the proof.

Feedback that quotes me

Afterwards, the feedback quotes what I said or wrote, measures it against my criteria and suggests one thing to try next. I can retry the hardest moment straight away. The saved result links back to where the practice started: the exact passage, my place in the book and its deck.

Practice that starts in coaching

I also built a coaching workspace for wellness practices, and a separate path that’s still in development connects it to this practice tool. In its career-coaching topic, a reply can turn into interview practice here for a client whose account I’ve connected, and the result goes back into that coaching conversation. From there the client can choose to share it with their practitioner. My own study stays separate: practice that starts from a book comes back to the book.

A home page that starts with what’s next

The portal opens on what I can pick up again, like the book I stopped in or a practice I haven’t finished, with direct ways into interview prep, studying and card review. Below that are a short note about what I’m focusing on this week, the cards that are due, new video digests ranked against those focuses, and agent work waiting on me. It’s meant to be read to the end, like a newspaper, rather than scrolled like a feed, and it’s designed for an e-ink screen first.

Handing work to agents

Every page in the portal has a feedback button. A note there becomes a task brief, and from the list of briefs I can hand one to a coding agent. The agents run on the server, and that’s what my e-ink experiment relies on: I send a request from the tablet, let an agent work, and come back to read the result.

The agents can also search the books, courses and recordings I own and quote the original passage, with where it came from, instead of paraphrasing from memory.

What runs where

The server: The study app and my progress, the library of what I own, the coding agents, bulk transcription, and the builds and development servers for my projects.
My Mac: The screen I work at, the apps that need a Mac, and quick on-device transcription when an exact transcript matters.
Phone and e-ink tablet: Screens for reading, listening and reviewing away from my desk. They open the same portal and study app.

Where it stands

I use the study app, the portal, the library and the agents every day, and practice is the newest part. I recently reorganized the portal around Home, Library and Practice, so that going from a source to studying, practicing and back feels like one path. Anki Local, my keyboard-first card app, is still a separate prototype on my Mac. Next I want downloads and lock-screen playback on my phone. If you’re building something similar, I’d like to compare notes.

Ask me about it Other projects under development