My Story
I've always loved making things that people enjoy using.
It started in elementary school. Minecraft was everything for me and my friends. This was way before realms, I remember modding Minecraft as early as 1.2.5, but that's beside the point. I needed a way to connect with my friends and play together with them! So after following YouTube tutorial after tutorial, I eventually figured out how to spin up Minecraft servers on my old iMac given to me by my father. It was the thick white shell one, completely squared off.
The whole start.command creation ritual. Running "chmod a+x " but LEAVE A SPACE after the a+x and drag the start.command over the terminal window to get the double-click to run your Minecraft server working. This was honestly my first experience with the unix terminal!
This eventually spiraled into using CraftBukkit, then Spigot, then trying to host my own BungeeCord network of mini games which unfortunately never took off. Regardless, this was teaching me more about how to use a computer than I realized. Minecraft was insanely valuable to me outside of placing and breaking blocks, and I had no idea.
A bit more into the future, its middle school and I'm in a new school (Ranney School) with new friends! Alongside of making Minecraft servers for my friends and I (this seemed to have never gone away), I'm piecing together Scratch games so I can have some fun with my friends between classes and during homeroom. Search Vinny_0 on Scratch - that's my old profile! Battle Ring was my main game. It was a simple game about squares that shoot squares at each other, with some other game modes. All my friends would pile onto one Chromebook, each player claiming a subset of keys: WASD, TFGH, IJKL, and arrow keys.
Eventually, I decided that we needed a better experience. So I remade Battle Ring in Unity. For the first time ever, I was writing real code! This was a massive undertaking, but I eventually figured it out.
I didn't think it was good enough. We had a great unity game, it ran smoother than Scratch, it looked prettier, and I was able to add stuff faster. The main issue still persisted, though. Everyone had to pile onto one Chromebook and share a single keyboard. While this was really fun, if you're in the middle of the keyboard you were at a massive disadvantage! My personal website at the time, vinnysaj.net (powered by a LAMP stack then), was unblocked by the school - they had no idea I was hosting Battle Ring and some other games via Unity WebGL. I taught myself Photon Unity Networking (PUN v1) and integrated live multiplayer into my little game about squares shooting each other. This was the most massive undertaking in software I had ever faced, being 13 at the time. In the end, PUN was a great choice for the small user base I had. It worked amazingly! I added tons more game modes to Battle Ring and all my friends were having a blast, individually on all of our Chromebooks. It got so bad that we were connecting and playing mid-class when our Chromebooks were out for some other purpose.
Eventually the school blocked my personal website. Not sure if some web filter picked up on it, or they just saw all the web traffic going to one site and eventually checked it out. I never asked. But I found an easy way around - I just renewed my DHCP WAN lease and got a new IP. vinnysaj.net was back up under vinnysaj.com and a new IP. Totally different person to the web filter.
Combing through the Chromebook settings just trying to figure out in any way shape or form to enable the holy "Developer Mode" to unlock a lot more things, I eventually found that I could deploy a VPN to the device without any issues. The school either forgot to disable this setting, or there was no way to disable it in their admin dashboard. This led me to hosting a L2TP/IPSec server on my Mac in the basement via Mac OS X Server (yes, that app!). I eventually got caught hosting this because I admittedly got very excited with my newfound way to unblock *all the game websites* and shared it with a ton of my classmates. The school oddly wasn't as upset as I thought. They just asked me to shut it down. I did. For everyone except myself and a few friends, of course.
Going into high school with a bunch of fun little projects under my belt, I focused on a problem I'd been wanting to solve since I joined Ranney in 6th grade: viewing my schedule and assignments was painfully clunky. Opening a web UI on a Chromebook or my phone felt so slow. The process of opening Safari, then clicking your bookmark, waiting for it to load, then navigating to the schedule or assignments with many taps in-between. I couldn't bare the slowness.
So the summer before 9th grade finally began and I was officially a high schooler, I built yourRanney. It was a fun little spin on my school's system "myRanney", which was just a myschoolapp white label from Blackbaud.
Nearing completion of the app, I emailed one of my teachers for a class I was already assigned to, asking if she could add a homework assignment early so I could test my client side data handling. Thank you Ms. Patient - you were always awesome! yourRanney was mainly built by using the network inspector in Safari, following routes and data, and piecing together JSON structures that myRanney would return, for me to make those same calls and display it in a beautiful iOS-native UI.
With the app completed, and things roughly working well, I hit a little roadblock before I could submit. I stupidly built the app in Xcode Beta for iOS 13. It was all ready for the new iOS dark mode addition - but iOS 13 wasn't out yet. So Apple wouldn't take my binary, especially because I was using SF Symbols for icons, which weren't technically out yet.
So, I ended up downgrading a bunch of components. Huge rookie mistake. This made a mess of my code. But eventually, I finally got everything working on iOS 12 for the non-beta peasants! I just wanted this app out, I didn't want to wait until the iOS release came out, even though that usually coincides very well with the school year starting, Ranney starts a bit earlier.
Regardless, I submitted to Apple, got rejected once, fixed it, resubmitted. Then I left for Ranney's traditional 9th grade retreat at Camp Bernie. There was ZERO cell service, and my app submission was still up in the air. The camp counselors wouldn't give up the WiFi password. Even with some social engineering (trying to ask really nicely), and actually trying to run aircrack-ng to capture a handshake on the camp WiFi, I had no luck.
BTW - I had spiraled down a "hacking" journey from my interest in jailbreaking my iPhone. Yes, the whole Kali linux skid stuff. Kind of embarrassing looking back now, but also was really fun. So I was somewhat familiar with the aircrack suite of software.
On the bus ride home from my actual truly first "digital disconnect," I discovered that my app was approved and had been for a whole day. I immediately went to iMessage to share the app link to our school's big group chat. I sent the link, and people began downloading and signing in!
It was an exhilarating feeling at first. There were hundreds of bugs, considering it was my first iOS app AND first "production" server where I actually had to have good uptime to have timely notifications and web scraping working. At my app's peak, I had 300 users in my database. I have *always* loved seeing people use my creations. Hence why I made games. Watching smiles appear from little things I'd hide in my software, or just by how something I made helped their life become a bit simpler was my motivation. And still is!
There's obviously a lot more in-between here for the yourRanney story, like me rewriting the app in 11th grade and honestly making it a real professionally built app, but I digress.
In 2019, I visited WWDC. I had no idea there was a Swift Student Challenge. But I was about to find out. I had convinced my parents that spending $1,599 on a WWDC ticket was vital for my survival, after getting an invite email from Apple to join the lottery to actually visit the event! I had a developer account, shared with my Dad, who has the same name as me. This worked out in my favor because even though my father was technically the real publisher of the app, it looked like it was me.
Somehow I'm picked for this lottery. I'm ecstatic. Apple has always been a staple in my life, and to actually visit an Apple event in person was huge. So we quickly booked a flight to San Jose.
Walking into the McEnery Convention Center, the Apple employees are all cheering. It's honestly WWDC tradition, so much clapping and vibes! Immediately I'm funneled over to the WWDC Scholar line, and given a light blue lanyard. I was going to say something how I'm *not* a WWDC scholar, but I honestly was pretty overwhelmed and didn't know there was a major difference. My Dad, who came along with me for the conference, mentioned to one of the workers that I was not a scholar, but apparently it was too late. I already had the lanyard and the tag, and I was already in.
So with the light blue lanyard, I was asked to follow a separate line. I felt like an imposter! Well, I was. But my age was doing me a huge favor, especially since I hadn't even finished half of high school yet when I went to WWDC19. So no matter what I said, nobody would believe that I wasn't a WWDC scholar, I was simply too young to have my own developer account.
I made some friends and enjoyed the show. Little did I know that this was going to be the last live action WWDC, so I'm glad that I got that under my belt before they changed to virtual. I got to see the brand new Mac Pro with the "cheese grater" design as everyone called it. This was the coolest computer I've ever witnessed, and honestly still is one of the most beautiful computers ever designed.
Skipping forward a bit, the next year, WWDC20 was totally virtual for obvious reasons. But now I knew that the Swift Student Challenge existed! I could actually create something and apply to it legitimately. So I built a mini SpriteKit macOS game, themed to the WWDC style. It was all very sticker-based, so I made my SpriteKit game look like it had a bunch of styled stickers just like Apple's website.
The SpriteKit game was a homage to Battle Ring and some other projects I've made in the past, and I explained it as you went through each level. You started at Apple's servers, and you were the video stream for WWDC20 (considering it was totally virtual). Each level you passed you got closer to the end of the game, which was a TV to watch WWDC20. Apple liked this enough to choose me out of 249 other scholars to be a Swift Student Scholar! I now had 2 WWDC jackets, felt absolutely stylish.
This eventually led to me randomly getting a WWDC23 email! Apple was reinviting previous winners from WWDC20, 21, and 22 to come visit WWDC23 back in person. I immediately applied to that raffle system too, and was unexpectedly chosen again there too. I genuinely thought I wasn't getting into this considering all the luck I had spent with Apple previously.
At WWDC23, I got to see the Vision Pro get revealed, which I may admit I am now a proud owner of. I made some friends, including a lifelong friend Mason Dierkes! I learned a lot, asked some cool questions to actual Apple engineers, and toured Apple Park. It was great!
By now, I've graduated high school, just left WWDC23, and fresh with ambition to build something big. I started ivDash - my attempt to let people "DoorDash" IV therapy to their house. A nurse comes to your house for rapid recovery when you're sick or hungover, simple and easy recovery.
Partnered with a doctor and nurse, I built the whole ordering, checkout, and tracking system from scratch. An interactive IV customization editor (first in raw HTML/JS, later migrated to React - my first time using it). I also built a simple SwiftUI-based nurse companion app with live location tracking (this was also my first time using SwiftUI, coming from UIKit). The full order flow with health questionnaires and e-signatures was all perfected and custom built for the company.
The software was built after some time, considering I had also started my first year of college at Embry-Riddle. Eventually, it was perfected and order flows worked, nurse flows worked, and everything was nicely put together. All built in React + Symfony.
While the software was now ready, business wasn't. I didn't know SEO or marketing - or even what a domain rating was. I relied on Google Ads and some light social media marketing. I eventually came to the conclusion that IV therapy was too niche, and mobile-only IV therapy was a niche within a niche. The New Jersey competitors offered treatments our mobile architecture couldn't support. After a couple of months with few customers, I shut it down. Not knowing my problem in all honestly was a marketing issue. It is pretty crazy how most of the battle is just GETTING people to use your software, and this was the moment when I realized that building software wasn't really the hard part anymore.
But I learned a lot. And my first use of React for ivDash spiraled into... well, this OS X recreation you're looking at.