Closing out 2025

This year, I added a ton of new features to an existing app, launched a new app, and made a hobby project I do each year a lot less painful.

LookForward

LookForward is an iOS app I built almost 6 years ago to help people discover and track release dates for movies and video games. I came up with the name when I was driving to my grandparents and said to myself "I need something to look forward to" while I was struggling through a breakup. It's deeply personal to me, which is why I pour myself into it.

This year might be its biggest evolution yet, getting a new design with Liquid Glass (hate it or love it), filters for your countdown list, and LookForward Pro which gives power users extra tools like a widget for upcoming countdowns. I'm especially proud of this last one since it lets you see items you're excited about right from your home screen, something I wanted years ago.

Simply Water

Simply Water is an iOS app that let's you track how much water you've had throughout the day. I built it at the beginning of the year after passing out from dehydration. It's incredibly minimal compared to other hydration tracking apps. I vibe coded it over a weekend, using it as my first testbed for AI assisted development with GitHub Copilot.

An easier way to show off my movie watch history

In past years, I would use the Trakt API to get my watch history for the year, and use Figma to export frames of movie posters so I can create an Instagram story at the end of the year showing off first time watches. This little side project would require a half days work each year to get all of the posters lined up properly for each board to match Instagram's suggestions for story safe zones.

I recently learned Go, so I built an AWS Lambda function that gets my movie watch history for the year. Even more recently, I built a small Remotion project that uses React to get that data and turn it into a video of movie posters that matches Instagram's suggestions for story resolution, safe zones, and video length. You can see a preview below. This process only takes a few minutes now.

Additions to my tech stack

• Go
• AWS - Passed the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam
• iOS Widgets - Adding widgets with SwiftUI to React Native apps
• AI - I've become a big fan of Claude Code

Thanks for reading my first post! I'm hoping to write more of these next year.