I honestly didn't think I'd ever get to write this post.

A year ago, I started building my private journaling app with an AI companion that helps you reflect and turns your thoughts into a finished entry. Today I hit "Submit for Review" for the first time. Rather than just announcing it, I want to share how it actually got built, because the messy middle is the part I never saw in other posts.

I have a full-time job, so this was evenings, weekends, and the occasional "one bug before bed" that turned into 2 am. Progress was always up and down; some months I shipped features weekly, other months I barely opened the project. My biggest process learning: tiny, well-defined tasks survive a 9–5 schedule; vague ones ("improve sync") die.

**The hardest technical problems and the decisions behind them:**

* **End-to-end encryption + AI is a genuinely hard combo.** The core promise is zero-knowledge; entries are encrypted on-device, and I can't read them. But an AI companion needs to read your entry to respond. I had to decide where the trust boundary sits: entries at rest stay encrypted with keys that never leave the device, and AI processing only happens on explicit user action, on ephemeral data, never stored server-side. Getting comfortable with that trade-off (and being able to explain it honestly) took longer than writing the code.
* **Key management.** Passphrase-based encryption sounds simple until you hit recovery, device migration, and the fact that a forgotten passphrase means the data is gone *by design*. Decision: no recovery backdoor, but aggressive UX warnings and an optional local recovery key export. Scaring users less than the alternative terrified me.
* **Building a rich-text editor.** I massively underestimated this. "It's just a text box", it is not. I eventually stopped fighting a custom implementation and built on an existing editor framework, then customized it. Learning: buy/adopt for undifferentiated hard problems; build only what makes your app *yours*.
* **Syncing encrypted blobs.** Conflict resolution when the server can't see the content is fun. I settled on last-write-wins per entry with local version history as a safety net, its not perfect, but I think shippable for v1. Perfect CRDT sync was a rabbit hole I had to climb out of but potentially something to implement or look into v2.
* **App Store prep.** Privacy nutrition labels, AI content guidelines, screenshots. The last 10% really is another 90%.

**What I would tell myself if I was starting again"**

1. Scope cuts aren't failures; v1 shipped with maybe 40% of my original feature list, and it's better for it.
2. Write down *why* you made each architecture decision. Six months later, tired, you will try to relitigate it.
3. Momentum beats motivation. The streak feature in my app exists because I needed it for the building process itself.

There were multiple points where I was sure this would be one of my many abandoned side projects. I genuinely didn't think I'd reach this stage, and I'm super happy I got this far, regardless of what review or launch brings.

Happy to go deeper on any of it,  E2EE architecture with AI features, building alongside a full-time job, or the editor issues. And if you're working on something right now, keep going. A year of small sessions adds up.

After a year of nights and weekends alongside my 9–5, I just submitted my first app to the App Store