What I'm Building
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3
min read
Building Speckl: A passion project in EdTech
Some quick reflections on what I've started building.
On any given week, my team of educators and operations specialists would use these:
Excel sheets to track lesson schedules,
WhatsApp chats and Google Calendars to coordinate scheduling with our team of teachers,
ClassDojo for educators to share lesson updates with parents,
Microsoft Teams to coordinate internally on administrative updates
The team I lead delivers enrichment programmes across multiple schools. On an average week, we have 8 educators teaching up to 1,600 students across over 90 classes. At the start, the system was sufficient. We used tools we were familiar with and got the outcomes we needed.
However, as we continue to grow and my mind was constantly on ideas for expanding the business unit, I recognised that scaling up would require not only more educators inside classrooms but also more human hours on operations planning. It felt like there was a need for a better system in place, a system that will support the team rather than take us away from the more important role of being an educator or prepping behind the scenes for a higher quality programme.
This personal pain point came at around the same time as my newfound obsession for vibe-coding. Naturally, then, I started to vibe with Codex and coded the first version of ScheduleSync, a web app for just my small team of 8.
One month in, I saw the bugs and the UI failures. By the third month, I created a second version using Codex and pushed it out again. It was thrilling to create something that once could only be just a vision in my head. I had spent sleepless nights bringing ideas to the screen and whenever an idea popped in my head, I would ask ChatGPT if it could do it (more often than not, it could).
Fast forward a few months, I now vibe-code on Claude Cowork and use a custom domain for my new project, Speckl. With Speckl, I'm planning to go much further than what ScheduleSync did as a minimum viable product. AI integration, four user roles (superadmin, admin, teacher, parent), authentication with Google, payments with Stripe, schedules synced on Google Calendar, notifications sent to emails.
The prototype I have now is far from ready, and I am well aware of the risks of shipping something to public before it's ready. There are a million uncertainties ahead but I'm so excited. It's really just the beginning and I'm hoping to document my journey as it goes.
