Last week I was at TreeHacks 2019 in sunny Palo Alto, California ☀️. We worked hard over the weekend building an app called Citizen X, and won first place in two prize categories (“Best App for Civic Technology” and “Best Use of SoundHound API”)!
The Project
Citizen X uses a mixture of several interesting technologies to let you use your voice to engage with your local, state, and national representatives. Users can say things like “Who are my local representatives?” and “Tell me more about Keisha Lance Bottoms” (the Mayor of Atlanta). The app gives back lots of useful information about the representative and encourages you to engage with them on social platforms like Twitter (or even plain old email).
Window 3.0 is now available on the App Store. This is a huge update with lots of awesome new features. The app has had a major overhaul. It’s now way easier to use, but at the same time lets you do more than ever. There’s a new Dashboard screen that’s your one-stop shop for managing your eating windows, and a new Timeline screen that shows you the complete picture of all your windows and fasts. You can now use Window on Apple Watch, with Siri, and even from your phone’s lock screen.
This weekend I was at MHacks 11 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. We had an awesome time building a game called Recorder Hero, and got to use some cool technologies that I’ve been wanting to try out for a long time!
The Project
Recorder Hero is like Guitar Hero, but for the Recorder. You know – that instrument that every kid in America learned to play in elementary school. The game has a playlist of hit songs, ranging from Hot Cross Buns to Party Rock Anthem, that you can learn to play on a handheld digital recorder (your iPhone).
This summer I interned on the Developer Tools team at Apple! It was an amazing experience, and the sort of thing I had been dreaming about for years.[1] I got the chance to help improve the tools that we use every day, learn more about lower-level Apple technologies, and meet tons of other Apple engineers.
This semester, I worked part-time on the mobile team at MailChimp here in Atlanta. This was my second time at MailChimp (I interned on the same team in 2016), and I had even more fun this time around!
The MailChimp iOS team — Small but mighty!
MailChimp used to focus exclusively on email, but they’ve been broadening their horizons quite a bit lately. You can now create online ads, landing pages, and even physical postcards through MailChimp! While I was there this Spring, I worked on a new flow for our mobile app that lets users create and manage their Facebook ads right on their phone.
Georgia Tech’s 2018 Greek Week was April 2 - 9! This year, 27 fraternities and 10 sororities competed in over 30 events. We had field day classics like Egg Toss and Dizzy Bat, sport tournaments like Flag Football and Dodgeball, and other mainstays like Tug and Greek Sing. We had a team of 15 people working hard to make it the best Greek Week ever. I was our Technology Chair this year, and I got the chance to work on some pretty cool stuff! I worked with our new Tech Committee to build out mobile-friendly web projects like a new Calendar website, and I led the charge on organizing our first-ever Greek Week hackathon!
Bailout (one of my favorite events) — teams compete in an olympic swimming pool (literally, a swimming pool from the 1996 Atlanta Olympics) to sink the other team's canoe.
Tug — one of our largest events, teams compete in a tug-of-war tournament in a mud pit
Greek Sing — 5 fraternities and 5 fraternities put on a show with song and dance
Recently I was at MinneHack in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was a pretty short hackathon (only 19 hours of hacking!), but it was a great time! We hacked together a project called Twitter Assistants. It was one of the hackiest hacks we ever hacked, but it’s certainly pretty interesting.
The Project
Twitter Assistants is a twitter bot that lets you ask questions to Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant at the same time. You could tweet a question to @Assistants_MH, your question is sent to each of the assistants, and then they send back a reply to your tweet.
AR Planes is now available to download on the App Store! It lets you discover nearby planes in augmented reality – just point your camera to see all the planes around you. I’ve been working on it for a long time, so I’m really excited to finally put it out there!
Window has been on the App Store for around a year and a half, but until now its only been available in English. After gaining valuable experience from translating Blurb into Spanish and Chinese, I decided it was a good time to give Window the same treatment. With some hard work and outside help, Window is now available for download in English, Spanish, and French!
Blurb is a photo editor for iOS that lets you add customizable blurred backgrounds to your photos. I prototyped it at WWDC 2015 and published it on the App Store later that year. This new version is Blurb’s first major update, and it brings along support for Spanish and Chinese, a new look, and tons of other small fixes.
