3 years later, I just released the app I learned to code for 🤠

Around 3 years ago, I had an 'idea'. Disenfranchised with a social media landscape where algorithms made decisions for me, I had begun to mentally explore what a social app might look like where I'd know for each thing I saw exactly which of my friends wanted me to see it.

What I envisioned was and is pretty simple -- a video/picture sharing app mashed with email forwarding. Basically, for each 'thing 'on my feed, I'd have the ability to put that thing on my friends' feeds and nothing would appear on my feed that a friend didn't send to me.

I'm a product manager/designer by trade, so I knew from a technical perspective what I was thinking about wasn't overly complex. The problem was, I wasn't technical.

Young and naive, I jumped into Swift development on my nights and weekends. Over the next 12 months or so, I hobbled together a low-fi chat app called Ridl, copy/pasting code and following videos as I progressed.

After Ridl, I launched into work on my main idea -- I called it Pass the Mustard, picturing friends passing videos and pictures around like friends pass the mustard around at a cookout.

It's taken me longer than some, but fast forward another year and a half or so and I've finished Pass the Mustard and released it today to the iPhone App Store.

I'm not sure what the future holds for PTM. As most know (and have wisely advised me), the social media space is a hard one to break into. That said, today marks a tremendous personal landmark -- I've proven to myself that I can do it. No matter how long it takes 😁

If you want to check out PTM: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/id1524337418