Precious

A YC back company, Precious is the iPhone app that tells the story of your children growing up. Using Artificial Intelligence, the app automatically finds the best baby pics on your phone, and then creates deliciously cute photo stories for you.

Website App store

Precious screenshot

I was responsible for:

  • Built and maintained the iOS app and Django backend with over 100k active subscriptions

  • Lead on many features such as the Universal Image Editor, stickers, and PushKit implementation

  • Led the effort to simplify, reduce bugs, and improve the app’s code base

  • Created an internal tool cutting the time to author artwork from 1 hour to 2 minutes

  • Utilized user-interviews to guide development of new features

  • Implemented a ML image processing pipeline in the iOS application

- Proud Of -

Precious was a very dynamic company that worked hard to empower its motivated employees. The process for turning a piece of art into something the iOS app could use was a tedious process. Sometimes taking up to a few hours for a single piece of artwork. I took the initiative to solve this issue by creating a Photoshop plugin tool. The tool was written in Javascript and ran on Node.js. Ultimately the tool brought the process down to a few minutes per piece of artwork and enabled us to create more powerful features in our art.

- Chris Lau, CEO of Precious -

Dakota was a standout engineer at startup, and he was a great delight to work with. I hired Dakota in 2018, and he was a full stack developer on my team for five years. I was incredibly impressed by and grateful for his technical versatility and ability to adapt to business needs. He was a key contributor to projects ranging from a photo editing iOS app using Swift, to a video-based shopping website using Python, to a VR app using Unity. Dakota brings fun energy to the team, and I would work with him again in a heartbeat.

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Spark - Unity3D, C#, Realtime Networking, SDK