Copilot helped me deploy my passion project to the App Store

What I Built I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with technology. In college, I majored in computer science and took classes ranging from electrical engineering to human-computer interaction. From soldering transistors on a physical circuit board to designing UI/UX experiences, I’ve touched many layers of the computing stack—and I’m constantly mind-blown by every new piece of the puzzle I learn. However, my experience as a user of technology before studying it was very different. In middle school and high school, my phone made me feel anxious, stressed, and cynical. I felt lonely on social apps and isolated when I deleted them. I remember some summer days in middle school spent alone in my bedroom watching YouTube, where I was recommended extreme dieting videos. Back when I had no idea what an algorithm was, I still knew I was being harmed by them. By my sophomore year of college, I had deleted Instagram and TikTok and turned off YouTube recommendations. While this protected me from harmful and extreme content, I also missed important life updates from my close friends and family. After taking a web development class and learning how to build a basic card layout, I decided to try building my own social app: Lumira. My goal was simple. I wanted to create a mobile, personal feed of photos just from my friends and family, curated by their genuine interests and sorted by time. Demo https://youtube.com/shorts/DwbVU_LFOc0?si=9H5zPovzIbbW8t-i https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lumira/id6737853449#information The Comeback Story Lumira was born out of 3:00 AM manic coding sessions in my college apartment. This was my first fully end-to-end deployed and distributed application—and it was rocky. My code was chaos. My files were unorganized, and I followed no real patterns, but the thing that motivated me to keep going was that it somehow kind of just worked. I remember the sense of accomplishment I felt the first time I connected to my Firebase backend and saw a photo successf