My first app, built end to end

Yoto, the kids' audio player, ran a developer challenge last year. Build an app for their platform, up to $5,000 for the winner, judged on how many families actually used it week to week. I decided to enter, and Chores + Rewards is what I built. It turned out to be the first app I ever took all the way from empty folder to submitted, entirely on my own, in evenings and weekends around everything else.

That matters more than it sounds, because I'd always thought of the back-end as someone else's job. Front-end is my strength. Historically, the moment a project needed real server-side work, an integration, auth, a proper data model, I'd reach for a partner who lived in that world. This time I didn't have one. It was just me and an AI assistant, and I decided to find out whether that was enough.

It was not a smooth ride. Yoto's API meant wrangling OAuth and JWT authentication, which I'd never done solo. Generating audio dynamically and getting it to play on a real device took more dead ends than I'd like to admit. Because it involved children, I wasn't going to be casual about security, so I had to get encryption right rather than roughly right. There were a couple of nights where the sensible move looked like giving up.

But every time I hit a wall, I could describe it, reason through it, and work out the fix instead of stalling until someone more senior was free. The AI didn't do it for me. It kept me moving. And slowly, the thing came together, submitted before the deadline, working, real.

I didn't win. Plenty of clever apps entered and mine wasn't the one families flocked to.

Here's the part that stuck though. Losing the competition barely registered, because I'd already won the thing I actually needed: proof. I now knew, not hoped, that I could deliver a complete product end to end without waiting on a back-end partner. That single realization is the reason Doseloop and HealthVoice exist. It's where I stopped seeing the parts of the stack I was weaker at as walls, and started seeing them as things I could figure out.

That's a better prize than $5,000. It changed what I believe I'm capable of building, and I've been proving it right ever since.