For CS 465 Capstone project, my team is developing an ios app. This is the first time I am doing mobile development and it is very interesting. We are creating a dog park app and I am noticing big differences between web development and mobile development. The first thing that really stands out to me is that we must constantly keep the ui in mind and how the user will be interacting with the app. I am mainly focused on the back end, but there are different ways that the backend functions are triggered by the ui touch interaction and that has been hard to wrap my head around. In addition, swift has been a hard programming language to wrap my head around because it seems to have a little of everything. It seems like someone took the c programming language and added features from JavaScript, and other object-oriented languages. I am still confused by optionals and optional types. I understand that it is there to prevent null pointer exceptions, but I am wondering if there is a better way to implement it. As it currently stands, swift is very verbose, and it makes it hard to keep track of things. I prefer the simplicity of python and JavaScript. But this could be because I didn’t start my programming career with a statically typed language. Lastly, I am really appreciating the work that goes into creating full featured mobile apps.