Mildly annoyed by the big green owl's limitations, I decided to build Translamore - an app that lets you turn whatever you're reading into your own language exercises. What started as a small weekend project quickly turned into a full-blown side quest. I'll kick things off with a quick demo of Translamore and then share some of the lessons from building it in my spare time: Project Management: staying organized when no one's watching, figuring out what's worth your time, keeping motivation alive, and the few tools that saved my sanity; LLMs & Prompt Engineering: what actually worked for me, using unit tests to wrangle prompts, a bit of templating magic, and my Prompt Resolver contraption; Server-Side Dart: why you really shouldn't ship your LLM API keys, how I structured packages and dependencies, used sealed classes for the API, and yes - called Python from Dart in the least elegant way possible. Expect some lessons, a few confessions, and probably one or two dont do what I did moments.