Posts

Hi! Petr Korobeinikov here. I lead backend development in one of the key fintech teams, and I’m responsible for making sure that users of the My MTS app always see up-to-date information about their account. In short: we run Go on the backend, and we talk to the app over GraphQL – a choice dictated by the platform, since we effectively expose a subgraph that our part of the app queries.

Say you’re preparing AppStore screenshots by hand, taking them on the simulator. It would be really nice if the clock on them showed 9:41.

Instead of pet projects — which for most of us end up frozen in the state shown in the picture¹ — I make a point of building showcase projects. The approach has worked out well and (I think) caught on with my team.

Kotlin has scope functions¹ — functions that let you run a block of code in the context of an object. Swift has no such mechanism, but you can either build one yourself or use a ready-made one.

RocketSim¹ is a very powerful add-on for the iOS simulator. But it’s available via a paid subscription. Let’s figure out who needs this tool and who can do without it.

Xcode is very sensitive to the project’s housekeeping files stored under .xcworkspace and .xcodeproj. For a solo developer working on a single machine, this isn’t much of a problem. But once again — we’re talking about teamwork. That’s exactly why it’s important for us to achieve transparent project portability and reproducible builds across all developer machines and CI nodes.

Even among strong engineers you can often hear the following take:

Well, microservices — that’s where everyone tinkers however they like, picks whatever they want, and somehow solves problems on their own.

Unfortunately, this is a common misconception. Let’s talk about the benefits of applying the Service Template¹ pattern at the company level.

The first step on the road to building apps is installing the development environment. At the very beginning, many people rush to install Xcode from the AppStore, and for solo development of your first app that’s perfectly acceptable. But you and I are focusing on team development, so we’ll need to follow some conventions and rules.

About 10 years ago I was handing things over to my colleagues when Craig Federighi, at WWDC 2014¹, announced a new programming language — Swift.

Engineering maturity is a marker of strong preparation, depth of experience, and breadth of perspective.

My current and former coworkers know that I use three terms to characterize the level of engineering maturity:

• Consistency
• Systematicity
• Reproducibility

Let’s go through what I mean by each. I’ll bring examples from my own domain and would be glad to hear yours in the comments.