Project
Layered City
I imagined, designed, and shipped a curated guide to Europe’s cities — first as an iOS app I taught myself to build in 2020, then rebuilt as a full web application with AI in 2026, expanded far beyond where it started.
2020 — Learning to build one, the hard way
After leaving LUMA Institute in early 2020, I set out to do something I’d never done before: design and build an entire mobile app, alone, from start to finish. Making the most of the pandemic lockdown, I taught myself the basics of Swift and went to work. It was a humbling process — a mix of success and heartache — and it gave me new respect for the specialists a real product usually takes: engineers, content strategists, marketers, sales teams, and business leaders. In December 2020, I launched Layered City on the App Store: a hand-curated collection of the best podcasts and videos about European cities.
2026 — Rebuilding it with AI
Then a full-time role put the project on ice for five years. When I returned to it in 2026, the tools had fundamentally changed. Using AI-assisted development, I rebuilt Layered City from the ground up as a full web application — retiring the original iOS app and expanding it well beyond its first scope.
What began as podcasts and videos grew into a multi-layered city guide: books, films, music, food, a local phrasebook, and self-guided audio tours, all pinned to an interactive map. It’s a technically involved product, but the harder work was the product judgment — deciding what belongs in a great city guide and shaping hundreds of pieces of content into something coherent.
I owned every layer of the rebuild — product, design, content, and code — with AI as the force multiplier. That’s the throughline of my work: I take an idea from concept to launched product, and I now do it at a scope and speed that wasn’t possible before.
I’ll present a lightweight case study of Layered City during an interview.
