Built LMS

Built LMS started in March 2025 as a learning project. I had just found Lovable, and I wanted to understand SCORM and xAPI better than I could from the authoring side. Those are the standards most e-learning runs on. Building a small LMS of my own seemed like a good way to see how they actually work.

I didn't stop at small. Every feature I added made me want another one, and in August 2025 I incorporated Built LMS as a company. I'm still the only person working on it.

It's now a full learning platform for businesses who need to train their employees, customers, and partners. It has a course builder with AI course generation, adaptive lessons, role-play practice with grading, live sessions, and reporting. It also has an analytics engine that connects course activity to real-world outcomes using a skills taxonomy and gap analysis.

Building my own LMS also meant I got to make the calls I'd always disagreed with in other tools. There's no "mark complete" button, because clicking a button doesn't show that anyone learned anything. Time spent on learning doesn't prove competence. And there always needs to be a human in the middle of anything AI generated.

It's also taught me most of what I know about web development. I've learned Next.js, React, Postgres, along with AWS, GCP, Vercel, and Supabase by building on them, not by taking a course on them. Things I used to see only from the outside, like how single sign-on works, how payments get processed, or how one app keeps each company's data separate from the others, are now things I have to get right myself.

It takes up more of my free time than it should. It's also changed how I work with AI. I've learned to use it as a partner instead of a search box, in development and in my job as an instructional designer. I'll write about both here: what I'm building, and what building it has taught me.