Yesterday my social media platform GeoGram.io became available on the google play and apple app store (You can try it here). This is a project that I've been working on for over 6 months and it's come a very long way. This began as my senior capstone project within the Computer Science and Applied Engineering Academy that I recently graduated. Me and my partner John Bulosan formulated the idea of a social media app that ties pictures to a location and time after observing how individuals at events each spend the entire time taking pictures of the event even though all of their pictures are practically the same. This rudimentary idea evolved into a photo sharing platform that was completely built upon the user's current location. We decided to allow users to post to a public feed and then only display pictures to users that are within a mile of where they were taken. This idea was compelling to us because it really allowed the environment of the platform to be dictated by the location where it was used. The posts that were taken in schools would definitely be very different from those taken at a place like niagra falls, but both would be fitting for the group of users that saw them. With a better defined concept we began getting our feet wet with development. We started with Xcode and Swift to try building a native apple application, but due to our lack of experience our progress was slow. We decided to instead build the platform as a web app since we were much more experienced with the tools required and had a firm deadline for the project to be completed (Or at least presentable haha). This move was reinvigorating and by the end of the next week we had a simple camera website that allowed users to upload and view pictures. After we implemented a location system to record where pictures were taken and filter the posts that were shown to users we began sharing the website with friends and family. During the continued development and implementation of new aspects to the platform this very vaguely defined test group was a very motivating and excited group of users. Then the project took a major blow. The first I heard of the issue was when a friend told me at lunch that his english teacher told his class they weren't allowed to use their phones during class because there was an app that people were using to take pictures in the school. I didn't really know what to think but I thought it was possible my app could be the one in question. Then, later in the day, I got pulled out of class to talk to two assistant principals. Although they couldn't remember the name at first, they wanted to talk to me about Geo Gram. Earlier that week I had tried to purchase an add for the app in the yearbook, but was declined due to the fluid nature of the content on the site. This brought the app to the school's awareness and they had concerns over the fact that anyone could go to the site and upload their own images. I think that they misunderstood the scope of the project and believed that it was exclusive to the school, since they visited the site at school and thus only saw pictures of the school. Regardless they expressed fear for what could happen to me if someone posted something bad on the site. They asked me to take down the site and told me that they would keep checking to make sure I didn't put it back up. This really killed my motivation for the project and me and John shifted our focus to the less impactful poster portion of the project (You can view the poster which was last updated on 5/17/2022 here). We spent a lot of time writing about the project, finding graphics, and playing Wordle instead of building the platform like before. After a very long break the developer in me was revived on the drive home from a memorial day vacation. I added the liking and flagging features that had previously troubled us and was determined to keep my momentum going. A little while after this I was introduced to the app BeReal which really inspired me. I felt that its ideology mirrored Geo Grams since both platforms focused on real life events (Geo Gram pictures need to be taken in app and can't be edited). BeReal was relatively simple but had become very popular, so I thought I should double down on Geo Gram. I began working on an infrastructure to add accounts, a system that was missing from the previous versions. After a week or two of really grinding the app handled accounts well. Users needed to confirm an email address in order to post and any user could flag posts, which hid them until they were reviewed by an admin. These security measures answered some of the concerns that were raised by the school administration. As the platform was getting polished our graduation date steadily approached. This was the unofficial second launch of Geo Gram since we would no longer be under the schools jurisdiction. Once we graduated the site was once again public and gained a couple new users that missed out on the first release. Then the next thing that everyone asked me was, "When are you going to make Geo Gram an app?" So, after celebrating graduation, I began working on building Android and Apple mobile apps that would allow users to access the previously web-only platform. This process included overcoming obstacles that are far too boring to be included, but soon enough the apps were complete. Then, yesterday, they became available. The process of getting the apps approved to be on their respective app store's required the addition of some safety features that would hopefully make my past assistant principals feel a little bit better and gave some validity to the feeling I had that the platform couldn't be as bad as they said. But the focus of this is not on what went wrong with the project. This app is easily the most advanced software that I've programmed and was my first big adventure into using PHP (Especially having it interact with JavaScript). The skills and lessons that I learned during its development were very valuable and I can only hope that the experience users have on the app is even slightly as valuable.