Making my way past the 405
to talk to one of my favorite iOS Developers, Tony Albor
I’m back again with another developer conversation. Yes, I’ve been working on my own apps (as you all know), but this series has been so much fun that we’re just going to keep deep-diving into my friend’s proudest creations.
So this time, I grabbed lunch with my good friend Tony Albor, who lives alllllll the way over in Santa Monica (anything west of the 405 is basically a different state for the non-Angelinos).
Tony and I worked together first at GOAT and then at Momento. We have a shared love for stew but, more importantly, a shared appreciation for therapy and mental health. Back in 2019, Tony and his friend Amar released an app called Worry Kit. Worry Kit is no longer on the App Store, but while it was (2019-2024), it housed a wide array of mental health activities and exercises, as seen below:
One of their most popular activities was an “anxious scratcher.” Scratch-art therapy has been around for years (see studies done at the NIH and the University of Illinois Chicago), but most of the products appear to be physical in nature (such as some products found on Amazon) and not app or software-based.
This conversation was conducted in person in Santa Monica.
It started out at Bread Head for sandwiches.
And then we made our way to LaLaLand for coffee.
Yes, seriously. It’s called LaLaLand.
Welcome to the Westside.
- Half a BLT
- Half a mozzarella
- 1 iced americano
- 1 iced green tea
How’d you guys team up on WorryKit?
My former co-worker (Amar Singh) and I started talking about it in 2018. He was a product designer and product manager, and he actually released two apps called Worry Breath and Worry Float. He then came to me with the idea of Worry Kit as a single app that would have an entire array of different activities. So we joined up together and then released the first version of WorryKit in 2019.
I knew you were proud of the app, but I distinctly remember you being disproportionately proud of the admin app (which you were the sole user of).
What was all that about?
Well, we were tracking all of our analytics in Fabric (free third-party software), but they ended up shutting down because they got bought by Google.
And around the same time, I remember flying to NYC for a Swift developer conference and one of the talks was about Server-side Swift (more on this at the break). I found that really intriguing, so I ended up buying a Server-side Swift book that was actually authored by one of the speakers, and I just got to work replacing Fabric with a custom backend solution built on top of Vapor.
NOTE: My face went full “WTF” when Tony said this because even in 2019, Server-side Swift was still an experimental concept.
Server-side Swift refers to the ability to use the Swift programming language for server-side development. However, Swift is the programming language primarily used to create frontend applications and NOT server-side applications.
However, Tony here, heard one talk about how Swift could be used for the back-end and was like “Yeah, that sounds AWESOME. Let’s try it!”
Okay, continuing on (now you’ll understand my next question) …
What the hell? That’s insane. Why didn’t you just go with another third-party service or go with a language specifically made for the backend?
Well, you know me. I’m a huge Swift fanatic — I love everything there is about it. So it really just started out as “Let me just see if I can.”
Because all I need to do is switch out where I’m sending our analytics data. All the events are already defined. All I need to do is create a database table for each event.
Lol — famous last words. “All I need to do is…”
Lol, yeah. I ended up getting pretty deep into it.
It started out as me just wanting to view an activity breakdown by day. But then I wanted to see more specific time ranges. And because Apple did not have a native calendar picker (at the time) and because I typically do not like to use open-source UI libraries when I feel like I can just build it myself… I just built all of it myself.
Did you get stumped on anything?
No, but there's just a lot of little intricacies that keep adding on.
For instance, you create a user. But then, it's “Oh yeah. A user requires a forgot password flow”. So now I have to integrate with SendGrid to send an email. And I didn't really want to do that, but it’s kind of too late to turn back lol.
And so luckily the book was pretty thorough, so I just kind of followed their guidance. But what was also cool about Vapor (Server-Side Swift platform) was that it had all these different integrations that made things easier. So I was using Postgres as a database, and there was a Postgres-like package on Vapor. So I was able to just plug-in really easily.
Would you do it again?
Yeah, if I had a project where I needed a backend and I had to do it myself. Because I like Swift a lot, and I don't want to go to another language!
It's cool just to be able to do everything in Swift! It's such a good language!
BONUS: Inside the Developer’s Studio
James Lipton, the host of Inside the Actor’s Studio, would ask his guests a set series of questions at the end of each episode. And because I’m a dweeb and I fanatically loved that show, I’m going to do something similar but with developer-specific questions. Enjoy the nerdery.
What push notification brings you joy?
Testflight. When the “app is now ready to test” notification comes.
What push notification makes you angry?
I remember I downloaded the Domino's app a long time ago to order a pizza.
And then, well, I had push notifications on, and so everyday at 4pm, I would get a notification from them. And I would never turn them off! I don't know why, but I would get them and I'd be like, “Why are they sending me this every day?!”
… but I wouldn't turn them off.
Last app you downloaded?
One of the more recent ones I downloaded was Linear and they went bold with a back arrow on the bottom. So I'm like, “Okay, okay, they’re trying things and you know what? I respect it.”
But you know what's kind of weird? The whole tab bar on the bottom kind of changes and I'm not sure if I like that yet. Because I like to be able to tap around. It's nice looking when it happens but I don’t know if I like it. But they’re trying things. I respect it!
Last app you deleted?
Yeah, I don't know. Actually, I have a lot of apps on here that I don't use. I don’t delete anything lol.
A developer that you think is underappreciated?
Alvin Yu for single-handedly creating the GOAT AR experience.
