Who made it

I built Firefly because I needed it

I'm Nurah. I spend my days building the reporting that a group of distance-learning colleges runs on, I'm finishing a Bachelor of IT in Business Information Systems at STADIO, and somewhere in the gaps between those two things, Firefly happened.

Firefly is my own. It isn't connected to my employer, and it isn't offered through them.

How it started

Late 2024, as something far smaller than this. It changed shape more times than I can honestly account for. What it was for never moved once: studying properly shouldn't depend on what you can afford.

Most of what I do at work is find out whether a number is telling the truth before anyone makes a decision on it. You get suspicious after a while. You stop asking what a dashboard says and start asking what it's actually counting. That habit is the reason Firefly's timer works the way it does, and it's probably the most useful thing I brought to it.

Why the other apps weren't working for me

The way I study is that I don't move on until I actually understand something. I'll ask the same question five different ways, because the fourth way is the one that finally lands. On a free allowance that gets you about a week. After that you're locked out, and the only way back in is to pay.

And it's all priced in dollars. I have a job. I'm funded. It still isn't money I have, and the exchange rate isn't a footnote here, it's the whole problem. Which means the students who need the help most are the ones least able to reach it — the exact opposite of how it should work, and something I've never been able to make my peace with.

Generic AI wasn't the answer either. I'd give it an evening and come away holding something that looked exactly like work — tidy, organised, finished — and remember none of it by the next morning. I spent a few months in 2025 training AI models, so I'm not guessing when I say these things are very good at producing and not much good at teaching. Maybe I was using it wrong. It wasn't helping.

What I decided it had to do

Everyone gets the same allowance. Forty generations a day each, counted in the database rather than in the browser. Nobody can burn through the month, and nobody gets more of Firefly by paying more for it, because there is nothing to pay.

The timer only counts what you sat through. Pause it and the clock stops. Close Firefly and it pauses by itself, and if you don't come back it ends where you left, not where you returned. A study app that flatters you about your hours is worse than no study app at all — you'd at least know you were guessing.

The material comes from your notes. Not from the internet's idea of your subject. Put in your Chapter 3 and the flashcards are about your Chapter 3, with its numbering and its examples and whatever your lecturer decided to emphasise.

Nothing is public. Everything is friends-only, and that's a rule the database enforces rather than a filter in the page, which are two very different promises. I write the POPIA standards for the tools we build at work, so this is not a thing I was ever going to bolt on at the end.

Every theme is measured. All fifteen of them, against a real contrast minimum, because something accurate that you can't comfortably read hasn't finished the job.

Where the name comes from

Nurah means light in Arabic. Bringer of light, if you want the full version. Nearly every username I've had since I was about fourteen has been some play on it, so that part was never really in question.

And I study at night. I always have. Firefly wasn't a hard decision.