Thank You, Bolsonaro - Part 1

This is a two-part story of how my first published iOS app came to be. Part 1 will focus on what the app is, why I decided to make it and early days. Part 2 is more technical, detailing the story and also the motivations behind the app's key features.

I'll try to be succinct but I have many things to say about what has been my pet project for the past two and a half years. It is also, as you probably guessed by the title, political. If you're not interested in things getting political (even though everything is political) you're free to close this now.

The app

Medo e Delírio is a companion app to the Medo e Delírio em Brasília podcast hosted by Pedro Daltro and Cristiano Botafogo. The podcast was started in 2019 after Cristiano read Pedro's eponymous blog and noticed how accurate and lucid his analysis of the Brazilian political landscape was. On those blog posts, Pedro used humorous GIFs to punctuate the events he was chronicling. A journalist by education and sound engineer by trade, Cristiano recognized the potential of turning that into audio content. He noticed many of the GIFs had video counterparts from Internet memes and those plus sound snippets from the politicians themselves would give the tone and weight to the absurdities he now narrates on a weekly basis on the podcast.

The Medo e Delírio iOS app came to be on a Thursday in May 2022. As I tell in The start section below, it started as an iOS version of an Android app already in use by the podcast's audience. In its most essential form, the app is a grid of sound snippets from the podcast that people can listen to and share on social media, the main one being WhatsApp. Fans of the podcast use the audio snippets as humorous sound cues when commenting on political news or even just to make fun of friends or other situations.

It could have stopped there, get your favorite sound bites from the podcast in your pocket, share with friends and that's it, but the audience is very creative – as I'll describe in more detail in Part 2 – leading the app to grow in many different directions. As I'll explain in further detail, for me personally the iOS app serves as a creative outlet, study ground and motivation when vibes are low.

When I started it, I was still married and deeply unhappy with my job at the time. The job paid good money, the most I had ever made in my career, and I had become an iOS developer after what seemed to me like a very long time (I started studying iOS in 2017). But that financial and personal success didn't translate to the coding bliss I thought it would. I'll go on a brief tangent about myself and Brasil before I explain the other reasons that made me embark on this journey.

Background

Brasil (yes, with an S) has been through a reactionary fascist wave. In 2018 Jair Bolsonaro was elected after a televised coup and on the heels of a corrupt duck-sounding judge colluding on sentences with an attorney with terrible PowerPoint skills to jail left-wing favorite Lula da Silva. Brasil was neatly divided between believers and non-believers of this right-wing puppet. Think the dread of Trump 2024 but 6 years earlier.

I don't exactly remember how I first got in touch with the podcast, but it resonated with me a lot.

If you were to look at me today you would say I perfectly fit the stereotype of the middle class nerd that works in tech and indulges himself too much with tech toys. But even though I did go to private schools as a child and only got my first job when I was 19 (a privilege in Brasil where 44% of the people have their start before they're even 14), my beginnings were not those of an entitled white kid.

My mom had me when she was 15 and my dad 21. My dad is to this day a truck driver but mom got a high paying job for the government through the power of education and dedication. As a kid I always felt split between a world of rich privileged kids with pools in their backyards, people to take care of them while off school and holidays abroad while I lived on a dirt road, spent most of my time alone at home and took long distance truck trips with my dad throughout Brasil. During those trips I felt a deep sense of helplessness. My father and I never really connected on a deep level – and I am only now, in my 30s, gaining a deeper understanding of why.

He never hit me, he was mostly kind to me, but adjacent to his charm and social aptness was a macho womanizer behavior I could not relate to. You see, I'm gay, but what I'm trying to say here is I was deeply aware of how precarious mine and my parent's financial situation was growing up.

My copy of Order of the Phoenix is decidedly brown from dirt from one of those truck trips. It was my escape. Aside from driving, truckers spend a lot of time waiting around for papers or to have the freight put on the trucks in the first place. That experience at 11 years-old taught me how most of Brasil really is and shaped how I see the world to this day. While my mom contributed with educating and taking care of me, my dad maybe gave me insight into what the world is really like.

Cut to 2018. Bolsonaro is the favorite in an election where the left had no real chance. On the heels of a now proven corrupt case, he comfortably won the presidential election. But more meaningfully, Bolsonaro did not only represent fascism and right-wing neoliberal-sponsored hatred for gays, women and blacks.

Jair Bolsonaro's classical macho man hypocrisy and working class-deluding bullshit still felt heavier than any homophobic slur he said. The issue is I couldn't really put to words what I felt deep down as I didn't have the political vocabulary at that time. I hated that man and I still do. Medo e Delírio justified my hatred. Through listening to the podcast, I could now get a glimpse of what was happening in Brasília and laugh at the absurdities – I came for the political commentary, but stayed for the audio memes Pedro and Cristiano perfected.

Then COVID hit. COVID, and Bolsonaro's science-denying bullshit-spinning deadly way of handling the pandemic in Brasil is what radicalized me to the left. I was always somewhat conscious of my social status, but the amount of absurdities we lived through made me realize it was time to take a stance.

I didn't lose any family to the virus, but the sense of doom was gigantic. That fucker appeared on national TV and said COVID was a "gripezinha" – a simple and inoffensive case of the flu – while most people still went to work wearing cheap masks and risking their lives.

If it's not clear by now, the title of this post is sarcastic. The working title was "Fuck You, Bolsonaro" and that's very much my sentiment. As a Brazilian historian once said, Bolsonaro is the biggest left-wing ally producer Brasil has ever had. I don't really want to give that man any praise. If you're reading this expecting me to say anything nice about him, congrats, you've been baited.

The start

Now we move to 2022. After widespread vaccination, we mostly don't think about COVID anymore. That's when my unmotivated self, dreading my 9 to 5 and staying 100% of the time home since I worked remotely, came across a Twitter thread of people clamoring an Android app that served as a companion to the podcast.

People were raving around a grid of sound snippets from the podcast – mainly short excerpts that were really internet memes like "Caralho!", Portuguese for fuck – that could easily be played on their phones and shared to WhatsApp by just tapping a share symbol on top of them.

I started scrolling that thread and other ones and seeing folks saying things like "I got my old Samsung out the drawer just to use this again!" and "please add such and such, I love this app!". Given that the app was Android-only, there were people asking when the iOS version was coming. My young iOS dev mind raced. How much more complicated than a list of MP3s and a share sheet can this app be?

Not much, it turned out. At least the "getting code and files together" part. Soon I DMed Sidronio Lima, the Android app's creator and thread author. After a couple of days we start chatting on WhatsApp.

At first Sidronio assumed I wanted to help delivering the app on iOS by lending him my computer for him to build the app. The Android app is built using Flutter, a software framework that lets you build hybrid apps, hybrid meaning apps that can run both on an iPhone and on an Android phone sharing the same code. But I wanted to create a native iOS app, something that uses Apple's tools and only runs on iPhones, because that's what I know how to make and also what I prefer.

On WhatsApp he asked "How exactly do you want do help?" and went on to explain that somebody else had tried and given up after meeting some bureaucracy from Apple. Now I understand the main issue, on top of not having a Mac – something required to build even Flutter iOS apps –, was creating an Apple Developer account, which is required if you want to distribute iOS apps on Apple's App Store. I had a free Developer account, one that let's you play around with building apps in Xcode and even run them on your device for free. In order to publish you need to pay a 99 US Dollars fee.

Being an Apple nerd and iOS dev, I knew what had to be done to get an app on the store, even though I had never done it myself. When I asked Sidronio for access to the shared folder where he got the sound files from the podcast creators, so that I could get some sounds and create the iOS version from scratch, he went silent.

I get it. A random guy on the Internet asks to be part of your gig. Are you gonna let him? But, see, I'm petty. Full stop. I should not be proud of it, but that sentiment got me rolling. Sidronio's lack of a response, which I took as a denial to cooperate, infuriated me.

I hated my then current job, but I fervently loved iOS app development. I had played with SwiftUI a lot during COVID, so I took note of every single feature request from that original Twitter thread and went to work on implementing them. Every single one, one by one. My therapist and I still have some work to do.

I probably could have handled that better, but still, that burst of pettiness set me on many hours in front of my MacBook, sitting in my home office, toiling away at this app that is now 2 and a half years old. And I love it. I've been thinking a lot about how software, specially UI design, is and has been my creative outlet for a long time, bringing me more joy than most other things.

A side note on the pettiness part: what motivates us is different to each person. I do recognize I have a big need to prove myself. I also think I've grown some since that moment. I could not have started this app if not for Sidronio's thread, original idea and, more substantially, the 20 or so sounds I stole from his app to launch version 1.0 of the iOS app :) Thanks, Sidronio. I think we're past our frenemies era now.

Why?

Why do this? Why a left-wing app? A companion app for something that I don't even own, that will never make any real money?

First of all, you're not wrong. Up to today I've made 3,171 Brazilian Reais from user donations (approx. 520 US Dollars). That's deducting all server, backup, Apple Developer Program, and domain costs. I've spent at least 8 hours a week on this app. Some weeks closer to 30. That amount doesn't pay for my dev hours by any stretch.

But if it's not clear by now, my stake in this is I believe in what the podcast has to say. More than that, I want to help on the fight to expose and ridicule Bolsonaro and right-wind bullshit in general. In less nice words, I see this as my giant middle finger to all Bolsonaro and the political current that came even before him stands for.

"The excess of hopes and demands over possibilities is necessary in order to force reality to yield all the potentials it contains, and to tap all the resources hidden in it." - Leszlek Kolakowski, Toward a Marxist Humanism, 1968.

Pedro and Cristiano started the podcast to chronicle Bolsonaro's presidency. Since then we've seen Lula overthrow him democratically and many good and bad things happen. Both creators have expressed the feeling of "this project might end now" when Lula got reelected in 2022. The storm looked like it was over after all. But there's never a dull moment in politics and history is disputed on a daily basis, so as the podcast keeps on going so does my app.

Part 2 is out. I hope you enjoyed reading this. My preferred way for getting in touch is Mastodon, but you can also find me on Bluesky and Threads.