Sora Kalden
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.
Here are a few of mine. Scroll through, and let's build the next one together.
Flua — 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. tryflua.com →
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 — a metronome that actually feels good; a tool to find the episode where a show finally gets good.
The 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. More apps live at kalden.me →
Apps, ~160 ideas, and the one move underneath all of them: find the right thing to build, then build the honest version. The domains change; the method doesn't.
"The domains change. The method doesn't." — from the notes
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.
"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
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.
"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
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.
"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
Singing, standup, improv, voice acting, speaking — the half of himself he rebuilt on purpose, 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
One camera, a single 23mm prime, golden hour. Portraits, fits, and the cities he lives in — the visual half of the same brain that obsesses over color grading and type.
"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 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.
"Prioritize control and intention over speed." — his own soccer training notes
A reading life run like a syllabus — philosophy, history, business — all read through one lens: 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
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. Badminton, YouTube, shipping. 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.
Write a TV show — he's 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 he'd do all of the above with.
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.
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 isn't the dice or the lore — it's 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 stopped treating it like willpower and started treating it like a bug.
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.
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]