iOS Club · Spring 2026

SideQuest

Turning city exploration into shared adventures.

City quests you complete, share, and compare with friends. I built parts of the social layer.

Role: Developer · Social Feed
Subteam: 6 people
Project: iOS Club · Spring 2026
Platform: iOS · SwiftUI

View source on GitHub ↗

SideQuest social feed with the top-three friend podium above a Golden Gate quest post — **Fig. 01** · The social feed.Social feed subteam · Mine: post data, reactions, podium

Problem

Travel ideas are scattered; turning them into plans with friends takes effort.

Approach

City quests to start, a feed and leaderboards to keep going.

Outcome

Presented at iOS Club Demo Day.

From places to save to things to do

Pick a quest

Food, art, landmarks, activities

Invite friends

Form a quest group

Document it

A photo completes the quest

Share and compare

Feed, leaderboard, passport

SideQuest quest detail: Walk the Golden Gate Waterfront, difficulty, and quest group — **Fig. 02** · A quest, completed with a photo.Team-built

Building the social layer

SideQuest friend ranking with the top-three podium and full list — **Fig. 03** · Friend rankings, topped by my podium.Mine: podium + compact variant

What I built · 6-person subteam

Comments: Helped shape the architecture
Post retrieval: By user, filtered by author
Friend requests: Incoming and outgoing
Emoji reactions: Per-user map, aggregated counts
Podium: Top three, plus a compact variant

Team-built: quests, travel history, maps, profile, and passport.

Connecting live interactions to data

SwiftUI views

Tab bar, navigation stacks, sheets

View models / shared state

Published properties, Observation

Firebase

Auth · Firestore · Storage

Firestore collections

USERS

Profiles, friends, points

ADVENTURES

City and its quests

QUESTS

Details, location, photos

POSTS

Content, comments, reactions

BADGES

Profile badges

Fig. 05 · Simplified MVVM architecture. Leaderboards sort friends’ stored points; no separate collection.

SideQuest post with its live comment thread — **Fig. 04** · Comments update live on each post.I helped shape comments

Focus · Comments

Keeping discussion attached to each post

Comments live inside each post document. A Firestore listener refreshes the thread when the post changes.

Benefit: Simple reads and live updates

Trade-off: Big threads mean big documents

Next: a paginated comment subcollection.

Reactions as a user → emoji map

Mine

Benefit: One reaction per user; easy totals

Trade-off: Writes pile onto the post

One podium, two variants

Mine

Benefit: Shared logic across screens

Trade-off: Fixed sizes hurt small screens

Known limits Feed loads in batches, not true database pagination · Comments are live; the feed refreshes on pull

SideQuest