Short week. Two commits, one clear story: Sommelio is nearly out the door, and a second project is now visible on the site for the first time.
Saturday morning I pushed the same small update to both theapparchitect.com and marcelrgberger.com simultaneously. Sommelio’s project card now carries a TestFlight badge and shows 95% completion. DokuAI got its own card added to the roster. That was it for the week — and that is fine. Not every week is a sprint. Sometimes the work is about keeping the public picture honest.
Sommelio at 95%: What “TestFlight” Actually Means Here
Sommelio is an iOS app I have been building over the past months. I am not ready to say exactly what it does just yet — that comes with the full launch post — but it is now in TestFlight, which is Apple’s external beta distribution system. Getting to TestFlight is not just a percentage game. You need a provisioning profile that covers real devices outside your own developer account, an archive build that passes App Store Connect’s automated checks, and export compliance declarations signed off before the binary even lands on a tester’s device. Apple’s signing and distribution model is, as always, its own special kind of bureaucracy. I have done it enough times that I no longer fight it — but I would not call it pleasant.
Ninety-five percent is an honest number, not a rounded-up one. There are a few rough edges I still know about: one layout that misbehaves on smaller iPhone screens, and an onboarding flow that needs one more pass before I would feel comfortable pointing a stranger at it. The remaining five percent is finish work — the kind that takes longer than it looks because it is the part users see first.
DokuAI: A New Project Card
The second change this week was adding DokuAI to the projects list on both sites. DokuAI is something I have been quietly working on in parallel. It lives in its own repo and it is early — early enough that I am not giving it a dedicated post yet. But it exists, it has a name, and putting it on the site makes it real in a way that a private repo does not.
I will write properly about what DokuAI does once there is something worth showing. For now: it involves documents, it involves AI, and the name is not an accident.
What a Light Week Actually Signals
Two commits in a week that touch nothing but project cards could look like drift. I do not think it is. TestFlight is a gate. Once Sommelio clears it with real testers, the remaining five percent becomes a sprint — feedback-driven, fast, and focused. A week of letting the beta breathe is part of the process.
If you are curious what it looks like when an iOS app goes from concept to TestFlight to App Store as a solo build, the work page has the ongoing picture. When Sommelio ships, it will get its own case study there.