This Teen Developed an App to Let You Sign Yearbooks in Quarantine
A conversation about the HAGS app for iOS
Among the many things that were lost in the midst of sheltering-in-place this year, one was the annual tradition of students signing each other’s yearbooks. Even if you’re not a student or the parent of a student right now, surely you remember this experience and can relate to a sense of loss about missing it. Graduating high school student and app developer Jameel Shivji took this sense of loss and turned it into an idea. Together with his sister Suraya Shivji, an engineer who graduated from college last year, Jameel created the HAGS app, available now in the app store.
The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
OneZero: Before you tell us about what the HAGS app does, I want to start by asking you about the name. What does it mean?
Jameel Shivji: HAGS is an acronym for “Have A Great Summer.” When fleshing out what HAGS would be, Suraya and I realized that we always wrote HAGS in our friends’ yearbooks, in elementary and high school, so we thought it’d be a fun name for the app.
You can try to simulate end-of-year celebrations with drive-by ceremonies or speeches on Zoom, but how do you replace the yearbook signature?
