πŸ•’ Two Brains, One Vision: How ChatGPT helped me Level Up My Toastmasters Timer πŸ§—‍♂️

Toastmasters Timer loves ChatGPT

Some of you might already know me as the creator of the most popular Toastmasters Timer on the Play Store — a project that started as a simple club experiment and evolved into a global tool thanks to AI collaboration.

Toastmasters Timer

🌱 How It All Began

Back in the cold winter of 2018, my former Toastmasters club in ŁódΕΊ, Poland — The Leader Ship Toastmasters — was struggling to fill meeting roles. Many members were sick, absent, or overcommitted at work. Each of us had to cover multiple roles per meeting: speaker, timer, Table Topics master, and more. It was exhausting.
What if the timer role could be automated?
I walked around my small room on Piotrkowska Street, opened my laptop, and began coding a simple web app. After three nights of work, I had a working Progressive Web App that changed colors automatically, beeped at the right times, and even supported a custom speech setup.

At that Thursday’s meeting, no one had volunteered as timer. So, I said, “Don’t worry — I’ll handle it.” My club couldn’t believe I had created the timer from scratch in just a few days. It worked perfectly — and that was the beginning.

Toastmasters Timer Legacy UI

πŸš€ From Experiment to Global Tool

Over the following year, I published the app on the Play Store, Microsoft Store and Amazon Appstore. Feedback started flowing in: people loved the idea but wanted a cleaner, more modern interface.

I’m not a designer, but little by little, I rebuilt the UI from the ground up — adopting Material Design, adding multilingual support (Italian, Czech, Spanish, Russian, Polish, German, Portuguese), and improving accessibility.

Toastmasters Timer - Material UI

I even open-sourced the core:
https://github.com/FANMixco/toastmasters-timer

Although I never received pull requests or direct contributions from the community, I continued maintaining the app on my own. I also wanted to keep it free and ad-free, but many ambitious ideas — like pre-planned agendas or multiple custom times — required rewriting the entire core. So, for a few years, the project remained in maintenance mode.

Those were difficult times. I was still living in Poland, spending my evenings sending out job applications (more than a thousand) and, above all, hearing silence. Every rejection or lack of response made it hard to find the energy to keep programming. The timer survived thanks to small fixes and patches, but major innovations weren’t even on the horizon. I thought it was done from my side.

πŸ€– The Turning Point: GenAI Joins the Team

By 2022, I was already settled in Spain, working full-time and exploring new ideas again. That’s when ChatGPT appeared — and everything changed.

I started experimenting with it almost immediately: first for writing and research, and then for coding assistance. It quickly became a second brain — a creative partner that challenged me to think differently, helped me untangle complex logic, and reignited my motivation to evolve the timer beyond anything I’d imagined.

Code preview

Together, we tackled long-standing user requests and expanded the app far beyond what I imagined.

New features since the AI era began:
  • Pre-planned agendas and meeting templates
  • Landscape and large-screen support (Chromebooks, tablets, Android TV)
  • Table Topics mode
  • Customizable settings menu
  • In-app purchases for future sustainability
  • Improved multilingual and color-blind support
  • Native dark mode
  • RTL support
  • Cleaner UI and better performance

🧩 The Technical Breakthrough

One of the biggest technical challenges I faced was introducing the Pre-Planned Agenda — a feature users had been requesting since the very beginning — without breaking the app’s original core.

The timer’s heart is over 2,000 lines of JavaScript, deeply interconnected with Android-specific optimizations that keep it stable during rotations and UI changes. Even a small modification risked breaking everything. I was genuinely afraid to touch it.

So, I started having long, structured discussions with ChatGPT. I’d ask questions like:
How can I expand my timer without breaking the main code? Is it safe to use multiple IndexedDB instances, or should I keep one? Can the new agenda system be modular without creating dependency loops?
Through this back-and-forth, we reached several key conclusions:
  • Introduce a hamburger menu to make hidden options visible without cluttering the UI.
  • Implement the Pre-Planned Agenda as a modal/dialogue, completely separate from the main interface — an add-on instead of a rewrite.
  • Block interactions with the main UI while the agenda is active, preventing data conflicts.
  • Build an in-app purchases module to support future development without introducing ads.
Pre-planned agenda preview

This thought experiment triggered a rapid evolution of the app — faster than I ever imagined. Within less than two years, the timer expanded to a much wider range of devices, including Android TV, Chromebooks, and large tablets.

However, before these new releases, my app even began to suffer a short decline in downloads and reviews.

Decline

It was a critical moment that I began to spend my nights improving with the code developed through GenAI collaboration. I was gladly surprised that after a few releases, some of my most critical reviewers updated their feedback in the Store with positive notes.

Updated review

⚙️ A Wild Exercise in Problem-Solving

With several successful features under my belt like the pre-planned agenda, multiple custom times, and the Table Topics mode. I decided to go higher and the next level was Android TV.

This release became one of the most complex development cycles I’ve faced. I had to build a new landscape UI which I had to kind of re-imagine it.

New landscape UI

However, the greatest challenge was the remote control logic. It forced me to rebuild several UI sections from scratch. The browser and Android restrictions started interfering with certain input events, I turned to ChatGPT again.

Preview of latest bug

And we came with a create solution to address the restriction:

Prompt #1

Prompt #2

Code preview

Thanks to these last changes, I expanded the app’s compatibility by more than 2,000 additional device models — reaching Toastmasters in more homes, classrooms, and clubs worldwide.

πŸ’‘ Lessons Learned

From 2018 to today, this journey taught me far more than coding:
  • Persistence beats perfection.
  • Listening to users is still the best form of debugging.
  • AI isn’t competition — it’s collaboration.
  • Keeping things free and accessible matters more than chasing trends.
It’s amazing what one person (and one AI assistant) can achieve when driven by curiosity and community feedback.

Now I can freely say that I am coming to the "big" screen for the first time:

Toastmasters Timer on the Play Store

Preview of the app on the Play Store

❤️ What’s Next

People often ask: What about iOS or Smartwatches? I’d love to bring the timer there too, but those versions require extra resources and hardware testing. If you’d like to support that mission, you can do so here:
I’m also open to collaboration — especially if you’re a coder interested in contributing to the project. (No PMs or “idea guys,” please πŸ˜‰)

✨ Final Thoughts

This project began as a small experiment in a freezing Polish winter — and became a global tool used by Toastmasters in over 100 countries and by more than 25k+ users. It’s proof that technology and creativity can coexist beautifully when guided by purpose.

Two brains, one vision — helping speakers around the world manage their time… and their dreams.
Location: Luxembourg

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