Dataresmic

My submission for Apple’s ‘Swift Student Challenge’ back in February of 2023
Swift
Target Audience: Apple’s ‘Swift Student Challenge’ judging comittee
Value Proposition: Education on the emergence of antibiotic resistance due to certain practices
Product Link: Not applicable
Demonstration Link: Not available yet
Source Repository: github.com/ammaraldawood/dataresmic
Influenced By: Several ‘Swift Student Challenge’ applicants from previous years


Technology Stack

  • Programming Languages:
    • Swift: Used for the entirety of the project


  • Core Technologies:
    • SwiftUI: Building the user interface of the app
    • Swift Charts: Used to create a pie chart to simulate infection and a scrollable chart to show the history of infection
    • Xcode: The main IDE used to build the project
    • Adobe Illustrator: Used to create the logo, thumbnail and the mascot (Dominic)
    • SF Symbols: Used to create the icons used inside the SimulationView

Project Learnings/Skills

  1. Software Architecture: Managing the interplay of different files, the environment and observable attributes, and handling persistence of values.

  2. Charting: Creating both a live and a scrollable chart using Swift Charts.

  3. Graphic Design: Created the logo, thumbnail, icons and others using software external to Xcode like Adobe Illustrator and SF Symbols.

  4. Practical Practice: This happens to be my first coding project of any kind, and so it represents the first time I went out of ‘tutorial hell’ into ‘learning by doing’

Project Pitfalls

  1. Scarcity of Training and Time: The project was created within 6 months of me first beginning to learn how to program and code, and it was started on the 20th of January of 2023 and finished by the 26th of February of 2023, meaning the code, art and ideation all happened in a period of five weeks. In hindsight, the project is riddled with issues.

  2. Disregard for UNIX Philosophy & SOLID principles: The project contains a class object named sharedClass, which resembles what is known as a God Object in OOP programming, an object that handles and sees everything. The Observable macro was released in WWDC 2022 alongside pie charts and phase animators, and by trying to incorporate all three into my project, I ended up working with things I didn’t understand and which had no fixes online for when troubles came up.

  3. Poor Ideation: The very idea behind the app is kind of useless and non impactful. For this contest specifically, Apple seeks out project ideas that are most likely to change people’s lives. Some ideas used in previous years didn’t achieve that particularly, but the projects were written so much better than mine.

  4. Lack of Testing: Having been so low on time working on the project, I hadn’t shown it to anyone prior to submitting it to Apple. During the next couple of days, I went to a cafe with a friend whom I asked to try and use the app. He had a hard time understanding what the app was trying to achieve, how he should act/react to its components, and finally ended up crashing it by ‘using’ an antibiotic too much, which lead to a number of bacteria skyrocketing high enough that the variable used to store them crashed the app. This was because I used the Gompertz model of bacterial growth which wasn’t log transformed or handled well to prevent exponential increases in counts.