Building Gogomi: 2025 in Review
Others are walking too!
I'm not the only one who experienced the joy and unintended effects of walking this year. Others did it too, after I released Gogomi to the App Store. It's been cool seeing my friends and complete strangers use it!
Talk is cheap, here's the wormery showing an anonymised map of people's walk traces in the Metro Vancouver area:
At the start of 2025:
At the end of 2025:
I've learned the stories behind a few of those traces. I know Desmond did 100% of Mt. Pleasant. Jack's going crazy all over Langley. Em and Thelma both walked 50% of their neighbourhoods in Vancouver and Coquitlam. Rob's almost through with Kensington-Ceddar, Rahel's exploring Surrey. A Pitt Meadows public official becoming a gogomite wasn't on my bingo card. And Tim, who emailed me and later met up for coffee, is on a quest to run all the streets of Vancouver!
And so many gogomites I don't even know about are probably out there!
If you're one of those reading this please reach out to me. I'd love to hear how you're using it and want feedback on how to make it better!
What I shipped
- Gogomi works with just a phone: Anyone can record their walks directly in the app! No more Apple Watch required (really big deal!)
That quote from the Excel team, "find dependencies and eliminate them", has been Gogomi's story. When I first started in 2024, you needed three (!) apps and an Apple Watch. Now, anyone can download the one app to start their walking quest.
| Date | Dependencies |
|---|---|
| April 2024 |
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+
+
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| September 2024 |
+
+
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| January 2025 |
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| August 2025 |
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- Added support for most of Metro Vancouver: I filled in missing neighbourhoods thanks to this custom map from K.L, and laid the foundation for Gogomi to work in any city around the world! (psst: there're two testers in New York and Seattle but that's hidden behind a feature flag for now)
- Stabilised the sync system with a dual approach: People get reactions for their walks right after (immediate sync), or later in the day (scheduled sync). More on this in April's devlog
- Lots of UI polish: Retouched a lot of views (once I found out about rounded fonts, I sanded off every surface lol), added some onboarding and cleaned up map controls. A volunteer helped me add live activities so people could know their walks were being recorded at the background
- Lesser known features that I worked on but haven't done a good job letting people know:
- GPX import: Wanted people to be able to sync with their Strava but the API was too stringent. So instead, I added a way for anyone to import GPX files. Close enough!
- Footprints: After 'completing' Parkcrest-Aubrey, I wanted some kind of graphic to show just that neighbourhood. Came up with a quick matplotlib visual that shows the footprint, which people can get whenever they 100% their neighbourhood.
- Milestones: One thing I'd like to do is practice more milestoning instead of just go-go-going. Here're a few from 2025:
- Published Gogomi on the App Store for real (after back-and-forth with reviewers)
- Finally got an official domain! gogomi.app (costs less than an UberEats order, why was I overthinking this?)
- Registered a corporation (Oboade Labs Inc) for Gogomi and bigger projects
- Grew from ~30 to ~60 active gogomites, without marketing! The waitlist also went up from 3 to 37 people interested in walking in their cities
- Survived my first outage when the database hit an OOM due to a power user's workload (they walked 5km every day of the year). Fixed with some batching and bin packing
Looking back
Being an indie-creator means wearing many hats, and I noticed I was feeling stretched thin over the year. For example, one night I'm in the swamp checking logs to figure out why the data system (running on a 'dev tier' db btw lol) was crashing due to OOM. And the next night, I'm sketching out the overall direction of Gogomi going watch-free.
All that flitting between depths added to the tension. Add the fact that I have a primary job with increasing responsibility and downward pressure, and it's obvious why the cracks showed eventually, or why I'd been keeping Gogomi under wraps. Didn't want to deal with outages from many sign-ups after posting a TikTok. Imagine dealing with that while on-call at work?
But in retrospect, I was being too hard on myself. Just look at the ship list for one side project! That not-enough feeling was bullshit! I feel more spacious letting go of that, and even more curious what 2026 would look like when I actually put Gogomi out there without restraint.
