Skritter

When George, Scott, and I graduated from Oberlin College in 2008, we didn't want to get jobs, so we started a startup. Skritter is a web, iOS, and Android application for learning Chinese and Japanese characters. Despite our potentially misguided focus on learning power over mass appeal--who wants to actually learn to write 10,000 words these days?--it has become one of the top apps in the market.

Skritterers have studied over 1,000,000,000 items. Whoa. It's a strange feeling to have taught people many thousands of times more characters than I myself know.

When you do a small startup with your two best friends, there's a ton of stuff to do, and you do a lot of all of it. With Skritter, in addition to a lot of everything, I did thousands of hours of developing: back-end with Python, Django, and Google App Engine; front-end with Flash, jQuery, and Sass; and mobile with iOS. Since we moved onto CodeCombat, the team we hired, headed by the amazing Jake Gill, has taken Skritter to new places, including new clients for web, iOS, and Android.

Interested in Chinese or Japanese? Go learn a zaprillion characters on Skritter.