The founders of Bulubulu first reached out to me through a hackathon I was a part of. They were looking for an iOS developer who was free to come onboard to develop their new app, which has now rebranded into Jasmi. It was an algorithm to recommend users local eats via their own social network and food preferences.
While I took an online course on iOS development, I was still doubtful of my abilities to balance both the startup work and school work at the same time. But I eagerly accepted because I wanted to improve my skills through real work experience.
The main goal of Bulubulu was to create an Facebook-like feed that would be solely dedicated to curating a food feed, much like yelp, but more focused on social interactions within the community of users. While most of the designs were already taken care of by another member on the team, I contributed to its continued development of UI/UX.
The essential structure of the feed would be focused on ranking categories of food. Thus, the users would be the ones creating content for the app, and the app needed to encourage users to constantly push out new content.
The "Model-View ViewModel" design pattern is something I closely followed, since it provides better decoupling and encapsulation than the normal MVC pattern. The viewModel is in charge of communicating between the data model and the view controllers, providing a middlelayer in between the two ends.
This was one of the first times I heard about Agile development and actually worked Agile. I'm glad the team introduced me to Agile development, and weekly sprints, as it made everything a lot more efficient.
After weeks of meeting and coding, we were finally sprinting to our Alpha release. There was a lot of excitement and plans as to how to promote and how to continue marketing wise.
Unfortunately, after multiple delays, especially on my part of the iOS development, it pushed back the team a lot in terms of releasing the alpha version. At the time, I was struggling a lot with school since it was approaching finals season, and I could no longer focus on the app wholeheartedly, especially because this was an unpaid job. All of it ultimately led to me parting with the team as they continued to push for beta versions of the app with the foundations of everything I had. You can check out their current website at:
Bulubulu Website