Who is behind www.oursharedcode.com, and why it works the way it does.
My name is Mark. This is a personal site. There is no company behind it, no team, and nothing on it is for sale — everything here is something I made for myself first and then gave away, because giving it away costs me a domain and some hosting and the work already existed.
I started at IELTS band 5.5. Nineteen months later I sat it again and got an 8. The gap between those two numbers is the reason half of this site exists.
What actually moved my score was less exotic than I had expected. The first thing that changed was not my English at all — it was telling myself I could do it, and repeating that on the days it did not feel true. That sounds like the least practical item on any list. It is the reason the rest of it lasted nineteen months instead of a fortnight.
Then I stopped writing in general words. I would write a bad thing where I meant an economic disaster, and that vagueness was holding my score down more than any grammar gap: the ideas were there and the language was flattening them. I kept a notebook of collocations — the words that live next to each other — until the phrases arrived without being fetched. For speaking I recorded my own voice and listened back, which is uncomfortable and is the fastest way to hear what an examiner hears. And I listened to the news and to podcasts for rhythm rather than vocabulary, copying where a fluent speaker slows down, runs words together, stops.
Afterwards I wrote it all down as free exam preparation books, at freeieltsbooks.net — free to download, no sign-up, no account. The page here is my own personal account of it, in several languages. Neither is affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to IELTS, the British Council, IDP, or Cambridge Assessment English.
The Prompt Engineering Studio is a drag-and-drop editor for building system prompts out of labelled blocks. I built it because I kept rewriting the same prompts from scratch and kept leaving the same things out of them.
It runs entirely in your browser. There is no model behind it, no API key, no account, and nothing you type goes anywhere — prompts live in your own browser storage and in files you save yourself. Alongside it I have written six guides on what I have learned about writing these prompts, including where the popular advice is wrong.
Every one of these started as something I needed and could not find for free, or could not find without handing over an email address first. That second one is the part I mind. So nothing here has a sign-up, and there is no database in which to keep you.
It is not free because it is unfinished or because a paid tier is coming. It is free because it was going to exist anyway, and a domain is cheap.
Hosting, a domain, and translation of the books into other languages. Some pages carry advertising to offset that; the privacy policy explains exactly which, what the ads can see, and how to turn them off. There is a Ko-fi link on the books page for anyone who wants to contribute, and no obligation attached to it whatsoever.
If something here is wrong — a mistake in a book, a broken link, advice that did not survive contact with your own work — I would rather know. Write to hello@oursharedcode.com and I will fix it. That is the whole of the feedback mechanism, and it is the contact page too.