The Spark
I'm studying for the CISA (Certified Information Systems Auditor) exam. The official review manual is 800+ pages of dense, dry text — audit risk formulas, control frameworks, sampling methods. I kept forgetting things I'd read the day before. I thought: what if every concept had a memorable illustration attached to it? A treasure map for audit planning. Fishermen for sampling. A robot at a console for data analytics. Something my brain would actually hold onto.
Building the study tool I wish existed, so studying doesn't feel like reading a phone book.
The Build
SteadyCert is a free picture-book study guide, now covering the full CISA Review Manual — all 5 domains, 372 illustrated sections, 372 practice questions, 326 mnemonics, 64 real-world cases. Every concept gets a story: a treasure map for audit planning, a detective agency for types of audits, a lighthouse for quality assurance. The illustrations are built with AI image and language models, then I go through and check each one for accuracy and whether it actually helps the concept stick.
No signup, no email required, free to read. It's picked up a small, steady trickle of readers over the months, and a few have emailed me real suggestions and corrections — which is more feedback than I expected for something I built mostly to study for my own exam. PMP is next, with CISSP and Scrum on the list after that.