StudiFoca

What it does

StudiFoca is an iPhone and iPad coursework planner built for students with ADHD. Where most planners answer “what’s due,” StudiFoca answers the harder question—how much work is actually coming, and when. A workload heat map surfaces heavy weeks before they arrive; assignments break into steps that unlock one at a time so a large project stops reading as a single wall. It imports from Canvas and Brightspace via iCal, syncs to Apple Calendar and Reminders, requires no account, and collects no data. The free tier includes every feature; a one-time purchase removes the limit on terms and courses.

Background

Founder story

Bacil Donovan Warren has been teaching himself to program since 1994. FutureBasic in his last year of college, then C++, then Perl—written to page him when a school district’s servers threw errors—then the LAMP stack, to build a coverage database while working as a contract QA engineer testing enterprise storage systems. Every language learned the same way: because a problem was sitting in front of him that needed one.

In 2006 he left technology for emergency medical services. Two years as an EMT, six as a paramedic.

Somewhere in the middle of that, he started building small iPhone apps for himself. He’d found the Stanford CS193p lectures on iTunes U and worked through them, picking up Objective-C and then Swift the year it launched. The apps weren’t ambitious. One calculated IV drip rates. Another worked out how long an oxygen tank would last. Arithmetic he knew how to do—arithmetic he’d been trained to do—under time pressure, with a patient in front of him, where getting it wrong mattered.

He was diagnosed with ADHD in June 2017. The apps came first, by years. He hadn’t known what he was compensating for. He’d just known it helped to keep the number somewhere other than in his head.

StudiFoca is that instinct pointed at coursework. A workload heat map showing where the heavy weeks actually fall, weeks before you’d feel them. Assignments that break into steps and surface one at a time, so a large project stops presenting itself as a wall.

What it won’t do is tell you what to do about any of it. No streaks, no nagging, no productivity score. Students with ADHD don’t need another system telling them they’re behind—they need to see the shape of the term clearly enough to make their own call.

Short bio

Bacil Donovan Warren is the founder of Quixotic Raindrop Software, LLC, a one-person studio in Tucson, Arizona. Self-taught since 1994, he has worked as a network technician, a contract QA engineer in enterprise storage, and—for eight years—an EMT and paramedic. He builds StudiFoca, a coursework planner for students with ADHD.