My family and I have been Disney fans for quite a while, my whole life actually. I always look forward to a trip to the park, Disneyland is my home park. During the summer of 2016, my brother and I were on a trip to Disneyland. I had decided I wanted to try out a new hobby, or start over from when I was much younger, collecting pressed coins from Disneyland. On the drive to the park, I was looking for some sort of mobile app or resource I could use to find the coins in the park. To my surprise, none really existed. I was lucky enough to come across ParkPennies.com which was and still is an amazing resource. During this time I was also trying to start my career in software development. I was telling my brother how there weren't really any apps for collecting pressed coins in Disneyland and he had the brilliant idea that why couldn't I make one. It was at that moment that I begin creating a possible design for a mobile app. It was a very exciting idea that took ahold of me wholeheartedly. I knew I wanted to create something that was simple, easy to use, and extremely organized. I also wanted it to be able to work offline (cell service at the park isn't always the greatest), and energy-efficient (save that battery life for taking pictures). Once I had an initial concept I reached out to ParkPennies.com to ask for permission to use their coin images. They were more than supportive of the idea and offered help in any way they could. I would not have been able to do it without them. Overall, it took about 6 months to get the app released to the public. I was not sure how people would respond to it or if anyone would even care, to my delight it was well received. I have gotten many suggestions from users that have become the best features in the app. I really could not have done it without the collectors also, you are the ones that keep this going for me. Your stories, involvement, ideas, and suggestions are what makes this an amazing experience for me. My mom and dad were also extremely helpful in releasing this to the public. My dad actually became a collector as well to help test the app (he has more than I do) and was always suggesting it to other guests that would be by the machines. My mom did the same and helped suggest it to people she saw. During the time that Pressed Coins at Disneyland was released, I continually got asked: "This is amazing, but what about Walt Disney World?". I knew that it would be another huge endeavor to make one for WDW since it has roughly five times more coins than Disneyland, no small feat to accomplish. I had decided that when I felt there was enough support for it, that was when I would make it. Well, it didn't take too long to realize that I was depriving many WDW fans this resource, so I began. One major issue I was faced with was the images of the coins. As amazing as ParkPennies.com is, they focus primarily on Disneyland, so no WDW images. I had reached out to another website quite a few times to ask for permission to their images but never got a single response. So, I had to re-design parts of the new app, Pressed Coins at WDW, to not have images of the machines and to use a default coin image. This is something that I felt was not fair to collectors, but I had no other option. When it was released it was well-received also, but there were concerns over the default coin image. The idea came up that I could ask collectors to send their images to me when they collected coins. This would let me bypass legal copyright concerns and give users what they deserve. It will still take more work to get all the images, but it's a start. This is an amazing community and I know together we can get this done without a problem. That is where we are at now and I am excited to see where the future takes us.

Thank you to my family and the many wonderful supporters of Bad Llama Group, I truly could not do it without you.