One year to ship it, one day to find out it didn't work

The first commit on SkillPilot is dated August 7th, 2025. The first real sale — an actual card, an actual customer, an actual euro — is dated August 30th, 2026. Just over a year between the two.

I bring up the dates because the honest version of this story doesn’t fit the “I built this in a weekend” format that gets shared around. It took a year, on purpose, because most of that year wasn’t spent writing lesson content — it was spent on decisions that are expensive to get wrong and boring to talk about: what the checkout has to guarantee before it’s allowed to touch a database, how a repository should be shaped so two apps can share a design system without becoming one app, what “access” actually means when money and enrollment are two different tables that can disagree.