Thru
Outside of work, I’m passionate about the outdoors and endurance sports like cycling, running, and hiking.
These activities are an essential counterbalance to the hours I spend designing behind a screen.
Recently I’ve also been experimenting with generative art and AI-assisted software development.
"Vibe-coding" feels less like typing out every command and more like conducting a creative performance. You
guide the flow, and the software plays along.
Those two worlds — movement and making — collided in Thru, an iOS app I built that transforms your
daily steps into a virtual hike of the Pacific Crest Trail. Every walk to the coffee shop, every run around
the neighbourhood track, becomes progress on an epic journey north from Mexico to Canada.
Not all those who wander are lost
Thru began in the summer of 2025, on a backpacking trip through Desolation Wilderness in Northern
California. My wife and I were following a small section of the Pacific Crest Trail – the path that snakes
2,650 miles through the spine of the western United States.
As a lifelong West Coaster, the PCT has held a mythic place in my imagination. I’ve devoured every available
YouTube documentary about the trail, always wondering what it might feel like to hike it end-to-end. On that
trip, we chatted with a few thru-hikers – sunburned, smiling, carrying everything they owned – and it
sparked an idea for a small personal experiment: If I added up all the steps I’ve taken this year, where
would I be on the PCT right now?
One step at a time...
Building Thru was as much a hike as the trail itself: steady, incremental, and occasionally uphill.
I built Thru in Swift, which was new terrain for me. There’s a simplicity and beauty to Swift that I
didn’t expect — elegant, direct, and quietly powerful once you find your footing. Learning Swift reminded me
why I love side projects in the first place: the joy of learning something new, and the satisfaction of
seeing an idea slowly take shape through trial, error, and curiosity.
The app uses Apple HealthKit to securely retrieve activity data from the iPhone. Every step, run, or
walk becomes fuel for the virtual hike. I wanted to visualize progress in a way that felt playful and
meditative, so I used SpriteKit to build a simple side-scrolling scene that evolves as you move along
the trail. Each new stretch of mileage unlocks a new piece of landscape art – a reminder that every little
bit of activity moves you through a bigger world.
MapKit is used for the interactive Map, along with the Google Maps API to pull in UGC imagery
along the route. You can zoom out to see your virtual position creeping north from Mexico to Canada, with
major landmarks described along the way. And because no hike is complete without weather, I used
WeatherKit to display real-time conditions. So even if you’re sitting at your desk, you can
vicariously suffer the elements like a true thru-hiker.
Together, these frameworks blur the line between the physical and the imagined. Every time you open Thru,
you’re seeing a small reflection of your own motion in the world transformed into a sense of progress and
place. I wanted it to feel like a companion you could check in on from time to time, not another app
demanding attention. There are no accounts, no ads, no data collection, no notifications. Just you, your
steps, and the trail.
Less doom scrolling,
more bloom scrolling
Once I got the core functionality working, I realized I wanted the app to be beautiful – something
I’d enjoy looking at regularly throughout the year. Inspired by vintage WPA National Park posters, I set out
to make every trail view feel like a miniature work of art.
Over 2,600 miles of landscape is far too much to illustrate by hand, so I turned to generative tools like
Midjourney and Photoshop’s Generative Fill to help craft consistent scenes. Each landscape – deserts,
forests, snow-covered peaks – became a prompt-driven experiment in color, composition, and tone.
Keeping everything cohesive in a single visual language was surprisingly challenging, but that process
taught me a lot about my own aesthetic instincts. It reminded me why side projects matter so much. They’re
playgrounds for creative identity; a chance to tinker, to practice forms of design I rarely touch in my day
job: character art, animation, branding, world-building.
A solo expedition
In the end, Thru became my quiet exploration into software for one – something made not for the mass
market or viral growth, but for the simple joy of building it.
We’re surrounded by software that tries to hurry us — faster, newer, more, now. Thru was my way of slowing
things down. It’s not about capturing your time, but noticing it. Thru doesn’t chase your attention; it
keeps you company. It’s a small act of resistance against the noise — a reminder that technology can move at
the pace of a walk, with a definitive end destination rather than an infinite scroll.
There’s something deeply fulfilling about creating a product experience that exists just for you. It doesn’t
need to scale, monetize, or optimize. It just needs to make sense in your world. To reflect something about
who you are, or how you move through your life.
Thru has been a personal project, reminding me that progress doesn’t always have to be loud or measurable.
Even though it was made for me, I hope you might find something in it too. Maybe a sense of calm, or
curiosity, or maybe just the reminder that making something personal can be its own reward.
The app is
free to download on the App Store.
Happy trails! ❀⋆˚₊⊹