WakaQuant
A local-first learning platform for a 24-week quantitative finance curriculum, designed so that the whole thing lives in a single file with no dependencies, no accounts, and no friction.
I set out to work through a demanding 24-week quantitative finance curriculum toward a master's in financial engineering. Every learning app I tried added friction: accounts, sync, subscriptions, and features I did not need standing between me and the material.
So I designed the opposite. WakaQuant is a local-first learning management system that lives in a single file. No install, no login, no dependencies. Open it and study. It is a small argument that disciplined scope is itself a design decision.
The tools got in the way of the learning
Serious self-directed study needs a way to hold structure, a 24-week plan, weekly objectives, and progress, without the tooling becoming its own project. The available options were either heavyweight LMS platforms or note apps that were not built for a structured curriculum.
Every added dependency was a future point of failure and a bit more friction between intention and action. For something I wanted to use every day for six months, that friction compounds.
Everything a learner needs, nothing they do not
The challenge was ruthless scoping: deliver real structure and progress tracking for a demanding curriculum while refusing every feature that did not directly serve studying. No accounts because there is one user. No sync because there is one device. No dependencies because they rot.
The hard part of minimalism is deciding what to leave out without leaving out something essential.
- Hold a 24-week structured curriculum with weekly detail
- Track progress reliably without any backend or account
- Load instantly and work fully offline
- Stay maintainable by one person, forever
What success had to look like
Zero friction
Open the file and study. No login, no setup, no waiting.
Durable by design
No dependencies means nothing to update, break, or deprecate.
Own your data
Progress stays local to the device, private by default.
Focused structure
The curriculum's shape, weeks, topics, and progress, is the entire interface.
Learning from what I actually used
My research was my own behavior. I noticed that the tools I abandoned all failed the same way: they asked for effort before they gave value. The tools that stuck were instant and quiet.
I mapped the curriculum itself, 24 weeks toward the financial engineering track, to understand the real information architecture the app needed to hold. The structure of the material dictated the structure of the app.
Friction is the real churn driver
For a daily study tool, every second of setup or load is a reason to not open it. Instant-on is the feature.
One user changes everything
Designing for exactly one person removes the need for accounts, sync, and permissions, which removes most of the complexity.
Constraints are the aesthetic
A single dependency-free file forces a clarity that no amount of framework tooling would have produced.
How I approached it
Model the curriculum
I structured the 24 weeks into topics and objectives, which became the app's information architecture.
Design for instant-on
I chose a single-file architecture with local storage so the app loads and saves with zero latency.
Strip to essentials
Every proposed feature had to justify itself against studying. Most did not survive, and the app is better for it.
Live with it
I used it as my daily study tool, which surfaced the small refinements that only real use reveals.
Key decisions, and why
The whole app in one file
WakaQuant is a single self-contained file. There is no build step, no package manager, and nothing to deploy beyond opening the file. That constraint is the product's spine.
It means the app will still work years from now, because there is no dependency chain to break. Durability by subtraction.
Progress that just persists
Completion and progress are stored locally on the device. There is no account to create and no server to trust, and your study history is private by default.
For a personal daily tool, local storage is not a limitation, it is exactly the right amount of infrastructure.
The curriculum is the interface
The 24-week structure is the navigation. Weeks, topics, and objectives are laid out so the material's shape is always visible, and progress reads at a glance.
There is no dashboard for its own sake. Every element on screen maps to something in the curriculum.
What shipped, and what changed
WakaQuant became my actual daily study tool for a demanding six-month curriculum, which is the only success metric that matters for a personal tool: I keep using it.
It is also a clean demonstration of a philosophy, that scope discipline is a design skill. Choosing to build less, deliberately, produced something more durable and more pleasant than a heavier tool would have been.
What I took away
The project reinforced something I believe about product design: the hardest and most valuable work is often deciding what not to build. A single-file, dependency-free app is not a limitation to apologize for, it is a stance.
It is also a reminder that the best tool is the one you actually open. Removing friction did more for my consistency than any feature could have.
- Scope is a design decision; subtraction is real work
- Design for your actual user, even when that user is one person
- Instant-on beats feature-rich for anything used daily
- Fewer dependencies means fewer future failures