CalAlert

CalAlert is my most popular app. It started as an app for my own personal use to alert me when I arrive to my destination at different Caltrain stations, but it quickly grew into something more that now has hundreds of users. I’m proud of where the app is now, but I faced many challenges with it, including: 

• Designing a user-friendly interface that can handle different inputs and outputs while providing relevant information
• Testing and debugging the app for different scenarios and edge cases

Integrating APIs and services to provide real-time information

To overcome these challenges, I used various tools and resources such as:

• Apple documentation to implement new technologies announced at WWDC
• Firebase for relevant information and notifications 
• 511 for API documentation 
• Medium and Reddit for dialogue with other developers 

Throughout this project, I was able to achieve my initial goal of helping transit users. I also improved my problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills. I am proud of what I have achieved with CalAlert and I hope it can help others as well. I also learned a lot about UX design as well as API usage. 

Discover Hilltop is where it all began for me And iOS development. During the height of the pandemic, my university moved to a completely remote learning modality. I found myself missing campus and the connections I made, so I was motivated to create something to help me feel more connected to campus from afar. The result was my first app, Discover Hilltop, which highlights different buildings, photos, and information about campus.

The app was built almost entirely in Swift/SwiftUI, and I relied heavily on resources from Apple and Paul Hudson from HackingWithSwift.com. The app used to be over 300MB in size due to me storing all photos locally on the app. To optimize the experience, I opted to asynchronously load all the images, which are now stored on my GitHub and loaded with a shared URLSession instance.

Going forward, I hope to collaborate with the history department on campus and rebrand the app as Hilltop History. The goal is to show the history of each building on campus rather than the current state of sharing general information of each building.