I updated my flashcard learning website from last year. Here is what I learned from refactoring old code.

About a year ago I built a flashcard learning/memory website for my girlfriend who was studying for the GRE test. Her request was simple, make a website where she could add cards with front and back side and then practice and quiz herself.

I knew there were hundreds of apps like that but all of them either looked bad, didn't work on mobile screen sizes or had crazy payment options or ads blocking the flashcards. So I built a simple website called Kitsune (Japanese for clever fox) and called it a day.

She used it daily and created 20 sets of 100 card sets, used it daily and was my loyal single active user. Took the test, got 169/170 (An amazing score!) and that was that. Apart from recommending it to a few friends and other students it joined my shelf of old projects.

Well recently I got bored with my latest project and decided to fix it up and add a way for people to share their sets by making them public for others to practice on.

This is where I hit the first issue. Not only did I use a tech stack I no longer prefer, I also did a crap job with auth. So for 48 hours last weekend I locked my self in the room and rewrote all of the auth migrating to Clerk, updating schema, adding features, and adding a real domain. I upgraded to react 19, nextjs 15, and added a new font. Seeing my old code and my past decisions was tough, but I realized something.

Even though the code was bad, the product was a simple mvp, and everything was outdated, I am so glad I had this as a starting point. I was able to move quickly and keep the UI/UX functional staying true to my goal of a simple product.

Now the project has been brought back to life and I will market it to students to aid them with tests. The joy of working on this project already left me satisfied and I hope this motivates you to make more side projects, start working on a random idea and see where it takes you. You never know where the project will end and that is the simple joy of being an inventor.

Please share to any desperate students: joinkitsune.com

Keep building and ship away!