Fog clears. Darkness lifts. Recently, I got to see the unknown fold in on itself and become known, revealing an ideal time to act. I’ve had a beautiful opportunity to strike while the iron is hot and it’s been deeply rewarding. I’ve been joyfully building an app and I am actively shipping it now!

— To avoid burying the lead, I would love beta testers - https://speakwithsanctum.app/  . —

I’ve transitioned into builder mode and am just now “coming up for air”. This has been a time of full on construction of an app that has been in my consciousness for some time. I built Sanctum predominantly for me, with hopes that others will use it. Solving my own problem in a very real way. This has been in the making for 2 years, I launched Scribe, a plugin for Obsidian, in November of 2024, but I’ve always wanted it to be a native app that follows similar principles around data ownership as Obsidian and is actually private.

Sanctum is a voice journal for the now moments of life. Real people are using it daily when walking, commuting, driving, cooking, in conversation with friends or in a meeting with clients.

From thought to recording in a single button press, files are in plaintext on your phone, interoperable everywhere, shareable with no account or download or anything - just send the file.

Privacy is important to me and it’s reflected throughout the entire app. I have no access to your data and the AI providers are also not looking and in the “full private mode” are physically not even able to. No model training, no data retention, no advertising, no tracking, no BS.

Building Sanctum has been a great way for me to execute on all the ways in which I’ve been thinking about coding in our agentic world. I built a production-ready, scalable, observable, iterable and beautiful application in under 2 weeks, followed by a week of moving through Apple App Store hoops. I had a solid MVP in two days.

Some quick headlines that I will expand on in future posts:

• When building greenfield, the starting place is absolutely essential. Agents follow patterns, give them good ones.
• Nothing is a single prompt, the ordering of what gets built and when is key. Line features up, create building blocks and primitives before expanding on them.
• Context is everything, the right piece of knowledge at the right time is way more efficient than all knowledge at all times.

The funny thing is that this is in no way different than my time as an engineering lead. Everything above is something that I continually deliver to teams that I work with, the same rules apply and it’s so gratifying to see that.

If you are a voice memos person, a verbal processor, a writer, a thinker, or someone who wants to capture shower thoughts then this is for you and I could use your feedback! Use the app (or don’t and please tell me why).

During TestFlight it’s free, sign up at https://speakwithsanctum.app/  and you’ll get a link sent to your email!

Thanks for reading!