Another infrastructure day. Still no app code, but the kind of work that pays off later.

Project inventory and organisation

Before writing anything new, I took stock of everything that exists: GitHub repos, local paths, live URLs, accounts, domains. It turns out spreading a project across Android Studio, an external drive, iCloud, and GitHub means things get hard to find quickly. I now have a proper inventory document in my Obsidian vault that lists everything in one place.

I also reorganised the existing project notes folder in Obsidian. What had been a flat pile of markdown files — original concept drafts, Perplexity research sessions, account credentials — got sorted into subfolders:

  • Research/ — AI-assisted market analysis and feasibility studies from the early project phase
  • History/ — the original concept prompt and Claude’s first response, kept for reference

Nothing deleted, just easier to navigate.

The knowledge base decision

I’ve been thinking for a while about where to put technical reference content. The blog is a development diary — wrong format for reference material that I’ll want to look up repeatedly. I needed something more like a manual.

The options I considered: extend the blog, use Obsidian Publish, or set up a separate static site. After some research I landed on a separate site with MkDocs Material — or so I thought.

While setting it up, I came across a post by the MkDocs Material author explaining that MkDocs is effectively unmaintained and heading towards an incompatible 2.0 rewrite. His team has built a replacement called Zensical — a new static site generator that’s fully compatible with MkDocs content and configuration, but built on a modern foundation with significantly faster build times.

Since I was starting fresh, switching to Zensical from the start was the obvious call. Configuration is nearly identical — changing the theme name from material to zensical was most of the migration.

The KB is now live at kb.musicapps.eu, deployed via GitHub Actions on every push to main.

One small hurdle: Python’s pip isn’t directly usable on macOS anymore due to the “externally managed environment” restriction. The solution is pipx, which installs Python CLI tools in isolated environments. brew install pipx && pipx install zensical — done.

First KB articles

With the infrastructure in place, I asked Claude to generate four articles to seed the knowledge base. I described the target reader — someone who knows Android development but is new to KMP and iOS — and Claude wrote them. I reviewed and approved each one.

  • What is Kotlin Multiplatform? — the core concept, what can be shared, what can’t, and how it maps to the SessionClick project
  • Gradle in a KMP project — what Gradle actually does in a multiplatform setup, the module structure, version catalogs, and useful tasks
  • How Kotlin and iOS work together — the Kotlin/Native compiler, how shared code becomes a framework that Swift imports, type mapping, and the coroutines/async bridging problem
  • Android vs iOS — concepts and terminology — a side-by-side comparison of screens, navigation, state, ViewModels, lifecycle, storage, and in-app purchases for someone coming from Android

The goal is to have a solid reference for myself as I work through the project, and to create content that could be useful to other developers in the same situation. I didn’t write the articles — Claude did — but I chose the topics, defined the audience, and fact-checked the output.

What’s next

The project structure documentation is still on the list — the simplified diagram in my notes doesn’t match the real folder layout that Android Studio generated. That needs fixing before I start writing real code, so I don’t confuse myself later.

After that: audio engine prototype. Everything else is just scaffolding.

Time spent today: 1h 12min

This blog documents my attempt to build and ship a music app as a solo developer, with AI assistance. The AI does a lot of the work. I try to be specific about what.