Sora
Kalden
Solo founder, builder, maker of too many things. I build apps and businesses, write worlds, run games, and learn hard things in 30-day sprints — and I'm looking for talented, curious people to make the next ones with.
The Maker — Building
~160 ideas and counting — and the ones that ship.
Flua — tryflua.com
The fastest honest path to a new language: one expertly-ordered deck, real native audio, and spaced repetition that does the thinking for you. He taught himself Japanese to A1 in ~20 focused hours with the method, then spent a year building the app that strips out the friction that makes people quit.
Weave
A minimalist weight-and-habit tracker built so the graph does the nagging. His mom lost 17 lbs with it.
Super Zen
A focus / calm tool — the small, well-made kind of app he likes to ship.
Small tools & the idea engine
A metronome that feels good; a tool to find the episode where a show gets good. And ~160 catalogued app, game, business, book and product ideas — each ranked, named and MVP-scoped, with ~28 games. Grab one off the shelf and build it with me. More apps at kalden.me.
The Eight Sides
The Maker
Find the right thing to build, then build the honest version.
"The domains change. The method doesn't."— from the notes
Worlds & Stories
Worlds since age 11 — a novel published at 14, a 150k-word dark epic (The Swords of Darkness), a homebrew D&D world, a manga still to make.
"Because I had to fake progress, I accidentally built a real habit. It makes me wonder how many things we could actually finish if we just tricked ourselves into starting."— on the teen novel
Learning & Teaching
How he learns anything fast, and the courses he wishes someone had taught him — built for understanding, not the exam.
"Being called smart my whole childhood made it part of my identity — and I was more afraid to lose that title than I was to fail a class."— About Me
Games & the Table
Take a system apart, find the fun, build it back better — a dice roguelike, a board game, D&D run as systems.
"Any time the best strategy isn't the most fun strategy is, I believe, a failure of the game's design."— from my consumables essay
The Modern Bard
Singing, standup, improv, voice acting, speaking — charisma treated as a built skill.
"I could not sing. I could not dress well. I was not particularly fit or especially charismatic. I was a very well-compensated specialist with a B-minus in everything else."— how I became superhuman in 2 years
Photography & the eye
One camera, a single 23mm prime, golden hour. Portraits, fits, and the cities he lives in.
"You can't study the color wheel for two hours and understand it. You have to train your eye over a long time."— on color
The Athlete
The same engine pointed at his own body — and the sports that are how he makes friends in a new city.
"Prioritize control and intention over speed."— his own soccer training notes
The Mind
A reading life run like a syllabus — read to build, not to collect.
"Everything is interconnected. Singing makes you a better speaker; games train you to perform under pressure. Each skill feeds the next. If you want to be truly unstoppable, learn everything."— from the notes
The Method
Pick a skill, go all-in for 30 days. Japanese to A1 in ~20 focused hours. Tone-deaf to singing from memory in a month. The trick isn't grinding harder — it's refusing to start until he's found where the common advice is wrong, then building the shortest honest path and letting sleep do the heavy lifting.
Dreams
Write a TV show — thousands of hours of film and anime, taken apart to learn why they work. Finish the manga — the "next Death Note or Game of Thrones," complex but easy to follow. Make Westworld real, as a game you can live inside. Open a café that's a third place for serious makers — one room. Find the talented, curious people he'd do all of it with.
The Gallery
Portraits, fits, and the cities I've lived in — Osaka, Tokyo, Kōyasan, Budapest, Lisbon, Nagpur. One camera, a single prime, natural light, graded by hand.
Writing
Distinct from the work — ideas, not portfolio.
How I Learn Anything in 30 Days
Not willpower — a method: find where the common advice is wrong, build a feedback loop, and let sleep do the heavy lifting.
The year I walked away from $250k
At my financial peak I was lonelier than I'd ever been — so I quit, lost almost everything, and spent a year figuring out what a life is for.
What Actually Makes D&D Peak
After 100+ hours behind the screen, the magic is a handful of frameworks for a world that's already moving when players walk in.
Why the best schools taught me to forget
I optimized for the grade at every school I attended, and it worked — which is exactly the problem.
I Used My CS Degree to Debug My Weight Loss
I'd done everything right for six months and the scale wouldn't move — until I started treating it like a bug.
The Quiet Line
And some things I do purely for myself — painting like no one will ever see it, building and painting Gundam kits, singing in the mornings, the occasional cosplay. No goal. Just the doing.
Connect
I'm looking for people who are excellent at something and curious about everything. Collaborators, co-conspirators, friends. If any of these worlds is also yours — or you just want to scheme — say hi. The best things in my life started as a five-hour first conversation with a stranger.
© 2026 Sora Kalden · Sora Kalden is the name I go by. Legally, Swarnim Kalbande. · [email protected]