The Social Media Marketing app, also known as Buckle Advocacy, was a year-long project through my university's senior design program which pairs computer science and software engineering students to industry-backed projects and sponsors.

Once paired, the course functions similarly to an internship where students work on a project throughout the year and deliver weekly status reports to the project stakeholders and follow agile methodologies while communicating effectively.

While enrolled in senior design, I took on a leadership position within my team and acted as the Squad Lead and Product Manager for our team. This tasked me with defining our product vision, leading our weekly meetings, creating our presentation materials, and effectively capitalizing on my teammates' skillsets in order to run a successful project.

I worked on this project alongside Kailei Mao, Arreya Ahrom, Olivia Rine, Dennis Qi, and Jake Ediger.

What problem did the app solve?

Buckle needed a way to provide a unified and appropriate social brand that protected the brand's image. Because they have so many stores across the US (449 and counting), it proved to be impractical to field and service each stores' one-off requests for approving social media content.

In order to solve this, Buckle wanted a mobile application that allowed their marketing department to provide approved social media posts for their teammates to use nationwide.

Our team's solution enlisted a content management system, Drupal, to house the marketing department's approved content. From there, individual pieces of content were assigned start and end dates for the content to run through, and valid posts were pulled down to our iOS application using a REST API and showcased to a user in a feed visually similar to Instagram.

Marketing employees around the country could then share these approved social media posts and promotions to a variety of different channels, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn with ease.

Things I learned

• How to lead a team of 5 developers by assigning roles and development tasks
• Process for facilitating weekly commuication between with a project manager and an industry sponsor
• Practices for parsing down software requirements into manageable chunks of development work
• Gained additional experience communicating with non-technical stakeholders
• How to develop iOS applications and the steps it takes to deploy to a live device
• The Swift programming language, along with Apple's new flagship technology, SwiftUI