My kids go to a small Montessori school, and it talks to families the way most small schools do: email from a dozen senders, a new sign-up link every week, a calendar on the website, and carpools on WhatsApp. I kept missing the things that mattered, buried among the ones that didn’t.
So in May I started building Morning, a calm daily app for families at small schools like ours.
It started the way my work always does, with the problem. I talked to other parents, wrote down who they are and what gets in their way, and found the moment to design for: 7:42 in the morning, a parent putting shoes on a four-year-old, who needs to know what today needs in one glance.
That moment decided a lot. The app opens on Today, with a card for each child that changes from drop-off to pickup. Staff write to families from a simple web admin, and parents read it on their phones, in one place.
The new part is that I’m building it myself. For years I’ve designed products and handed them to engineers. This time I work with Claude and Cursor, one feature at a time: a design system first, so every screen shares the same type and color, then each feature, then the bugs. I connected Claude to my tools through MCP, keep the iOS app, the school’s web admin and the website in one repo, and I’ve learned Git, the terminal, deploying, and how to write a prompt that gets what I mean.
Building for iPhone is the most fun I’ve had in a while. Each build goes out on TestFlight, and I try it on my own phone. Some days I just prompt from my phone, and the change comes back ready to try.
Next, I want to put it in front of a few parents at our school before the new school year starts.