Disclaimer: The trick I'm going to show here is quite powerful, but like every other underscored attribute in Swift, this is something you should avoid messing with unless you know exactly what you're doing. There are lots of pitfalls attached to these attributes, and the behavior of underscored attributes can change at any time and even stop existing entirely without warning. Don't go around sprinkling this in your projects if you don't fully understand the consequences of doing so! Swift is regarded for its type safety, meaning the compiler (usually) doesn't allow you to reference or do thin ..read more

The following is a list of software engineering books I've read that I felt had a strong and lasting positive impact on my career. It's not a list of everything I enjoyed (that would be impossible to list down), but rather a special list of resources that taught/helped me so much that I still find myself thinking about them years later. They are my top recommendations for other software engineers. Some are about iOS development specifically, but most relate to general software engineering. If you strive to be a world-class developer, these books and resources will help you get there. (I'm cons ..read more

With every mobile project, you will eventually find yourself hitting roadblocks that are less about the product and features themselves and more about the surrounding infrastructure that allows everything to exist in the first place. This can manifest in a variety of ways, but as a mobile developer you’ve certainly witnessed some of the telltale signs in areas like maintaining project and build settings, managing code signing, and resolving issues with CI/CD pipelines. These are just a few examples of tasks outside the feature development domain that you might have to deal with when working on ..read more

The topic of certificates and provisioning profiles is one that causes a lot of confusion and blank stares in the realm of iOS development. Luckily, in general, these things “just work". Apple has done a good job of abstracting away the inner workings of code signing so that, today, you don't need to understand the ins and outs of cryptographic theory to create a fully working iOS app and make it available to the world. But as your team grows, you'll notice that Apple’s abstraction only goes so far, and some understanding of signing and how to handle it is needed. In this post, we'll take a lo ..read more

Ahh, the humble app version. While the act of versioning an app might seem pretty inconsequential, if you take a step back you see just how often version numbers are relied upon in the development and release lifecycle. Your entire team – engineering, product, QA, CX, and more – regularly need to refer to specific app versions in their day-to-day lives as they prepare work for new releases, track stability and health across old releases, coordinate testing efforts, and communicate changes and provide support to end users. So, perhaps app versioning is worth some thought! Versioning software ha ..read more

Welcome to Part II of a topic I’ve been wanting to cover for a long time (and one which isn’t covered enough!): how to avoid burnout on a tough project, make building with a team fun again, and ship better products in the process ..read more

The problem of releasing mobile apps takes many forms, and what I find most interesting is how different the processes and solutions teams put in place can be — even across companies of similar size and maturity. Despite everyone facing the same foundational problem of having to optimize the process of delivering an app to the world, I’ve never encountered two companies that approach it in the exact same way. But although technical implementations differ, the release processes of large companies seem to always focus on the same core principles: quality control and data-driven feedback loops. T ..read more

Passkeys are an alternative to passwords that allow you to sign in to any website or app that supports this technology without needing to define/remember a password. Over the last couple of years, the tech world has been witnessing many companies updating their products to add support to this new technology, including tech giants like Apple, who introduced several APIs and device features related to passkeys in iOS 16, and Google, who has been pushing passkeys hard since announcing passkeys support for Chrome and Gmail back in 2022. When I first saw Apple and Google’s announcements, I wasn't s ..read more

If you have been developing for iOS for a while, chances are you had one of two issues involving code signing, the process where Apple/Xcode forces you to "sign" your app with a developer certificate in order to be able to archive it and submit it to the App Store. I find code signing to be interesting not just because of what it does, but because it's one of those things that iOS developers kinda just take for granted. We know it's there and we know how to deal with it, but we don't really stop to think why it's there or what it's doing under the hood. We just follow Apple's convoluted steps ..read more

Most mobile teams understand and appreciate the benefits of fast build times. Being able to quickly compile and test your code means quicker development and iteration, which in turn allows your team to ship more regularly and efficiently. But actually achieving fast build times, and implementing a long-term solution that keeps build times fast as your codebase grows, can be a complex undertaking. There are a number of different tactics, and while some are relatively trivial — reducing the size of bundled resources, for example — others can be much more involved, or even kind of dangerous (thin ..read more