I build apps and businesses, write worlds, run games, and learn hard things in 30-day sprints — looking for talented, curious people to make the next ones with.
FIG. 00SPECIMEN N°2
SORA
Solo founder · builder · maker of too many things. Here are a few of mine — pick a plate and let's build the next one together.
BUILDER · WRITER ·
MAKER OF TOO
MANY THINGS
↓ THE INDEX BELOW IS THE TABLE OF CONTENTS — EACH ROW SETS A PLATE
FIG. 01THE WORKSHOP~160 IDEAS & COUNTING
Building
~160 ideas and counting — and the ones that ship. The lead is Flua; the rest is the workshop.
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 every ounce of the friction that makes people quit.
- 02WeaveA minimalist weight-and-habit tracker built so the graph does the nagging. His mom lost 17 lbs with it.
- 03Super ZenA focus / calm tool — the small, well-made kind of app he likes to ship.
- 04Small ToolsA metronome that actually feels good; a tool to find the episode where a show finally gets good.
- 05The Idea Engine~160 catalogued app, game, business, book and product ideas — each ranked, named and MVP-scoped. Roughly 28 are games. Grab one off the shelf and build it with me.
- 06More at kalden.me ↗The rest of the shipped apps live here.
FIG. 02THE EIGHT SIDES · ITHE MOVE UNDERNEATH
The Maker
Apps, ~160 ideas, and the one move underneath all of them: find the right thing to build, then build the honest version.
The domains keep changing — a language app, a habit tracker, a focus tool, a dice roguelike. What doesn't change is the method: find where the common advice is wrong, build the shortest honest path, ship the small well-made version.
Talent here is shown, not stated. The proof is the shelf of things that exist.
"The domains change. The method doesn't."— from the notes
FIG. 03THE EIGHT SIDES · IISINCE AGE 11
Worlds & Stories
He's built worlds since he was 11.
A fantasy novel he faked his way into finishing and published at 14. A 150k-word dark epic in progress — The Swords of Darkness. A homebrew D&D world with its own playbook. And a manga he still wants to make.
The stories are the bedrock the games and the dreams hang on.
"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
FIG. 04THE EIGHT SIDES · IIIBUILT FOR UNDERSTANDING
Learning & Teaching
How he learns anything fast — and why he's building the courses he wishes someone had taught him.
Math, statistical and computational thinking, built for real understanding instead of the exam. The same engine that taught him Japanese in 20 hours, pointed at the things schools teach badly.
"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
FIG. 05THE EIGHT SIDES · IVFIND THE FUN
Games & the Table
Take a system apart, find the fun, build it back better.
A Balatro-inspired dice roguelike in design. A board game in progress. And D&D run as systems — 100+ hours behind the screen, hand-built maps, a world already moving when players walk in.
"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
FIG. 06THE EIGHT SIDES · VCHARISMA AS A BUILT SKILL
The Modern Bard
Singing, standup, improv, voice acting, speaking — the half of himself he rebuilt on purpose.
Charisma treated as a built skill, not a birthright. Tone-deaf to singing from memory in a month; the stage approached the way he approaches everything else.
"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
FIG. 07THE EIGHT SIDES · VIONE PRIME · GOLDEN HOUR
Photography & the Eye
One camera, a single 23mm prime, golden hour.
He shoots portraits, fits, and the cities he lives in — and it's the visual half of the same brain that obsesses over color grading and type. See the full set in the Gallery plate ↘.
"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
FIG. 08THE EIGHT SIDES · VIITHE SAME ENGINE
The Athlete
The same engine he points at apps, pointed at his own body.
And the sports — soccer, badminton, volleyball — that are how he makes friends in a new city. Training treated like any other system: control and intention first, speed later.
"Prioritize control and intention over speed."— his own soccer training notes
FIG. 09THE EIGHT SIDES · VIIIREAD TO BUILD
The Mind
A reading life run like a syllabus — philosophy, history, business.
All read through one lens: read to build, not to collect. Each discipline is a tool he expects to use, not a trophy on a shelf.
"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
FIG. 10THE DATASHEET30-DAY SPRINT
The Method
Pick a skill, go all-in for 30 days. The trick isn't grinding harder.
FIG. 11THE MANIFESTONOT BUILT YET
Dreams
Things I haven't built yet.
Write a TV show — having watched thousands of hours of film and anime, only the best, mostly to take apart why they work.
Finish the manga — the "next Death Note or Game of Thrones": a complex plot that's somehow easy to follow.
Make Westworld real, as a game you can actually live inside.
Open a café that's a third place for serious makers — writers, artists, builders, one room.
Find the talented, curious people I'd do all of the above with.
FIG. 12PLATES OF LIGHTONE PRIME · NATURAL LIGHT
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.
FIG. 13IDEAS, NOT PORTFOLIOFIVE ESSAYS
Writing
Distinct from the work — ideas, not portfolio.
- 01How I Learn Anything in 30 DaysNot willpower — a method: find where the common advice is wrong, build a feedback loop, and let sleep do the heavy lifting.
- 02The Year I Walked Away From $250kAt 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.
- 03What Actually Makes D&D PeakAfter 100+ hours behind the screen, the magic isn't the dice or the lore — it's a handful of frameworks for a world that's already moving when players walk in.
- 04Why the Best Schools Taught Me to ForgetI optimized for the grade at every school I attended, and it worked — which is exactly the problem.
- 05I Used My CS Degree to Debug My Weight LossI'd done everything right for six months and the scale wouldn't move — until I stopped treating it like willpower and started treating it like a bug.
FIG. 14LET'S BUILD SOMETHINGSAY HI
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.