The boring secret: I made my flashcards from real PRs
Every time I opened a pull request and didn't know a word, I copied the sentence into a Notion database. By the end of week one I had 47 cards — all from code I actually shipped.
The format that worked
- Front: a real sentence from the PR with the word blanked out.
- Back: the word, an English definition, and one example I'd write at work.
I reviewed for 7 minutes a day. After 30 days the words had moved from "I recognise it" to "I'd use it in Slack."
