Mobile Pick Up

The recording is now available for viewing, my first speaking engagement at an iOS conference! If you want to learn how we do AB testing at Grubhub, check this out.

Being in New York City has its rewards and one of them is having the opportunity to meet a high profile open source contributors in the iOS development community like Krzysztof.  He was in town for his work at New York Times from Poland so I took his one twitter offer to meet folks off of Twitter.  While discussion about architecture, design, coding and all the geeky things, I received some good pieces of advice from Krzysztof and below are my takeaways after digesting them:

Finding pain points to save time in the long run.  Many of his open source projects are available to help others save time in the long run.  Time is money and saving time can also equate to making more money by solving problems more quickly and efficiently.

Open source projects arose from the need to solve pain points in the iOS community.

Open source projects do not necessarily need nice architecture as it prolongs time to approve pull requests.  This encourages more developers to contribute without the overhead of architectural decisions.  The key is to create unit tests to ensure that old features are not broken and new features are well tested to continue solving problems.

Unit tests are as important as much as continuous code refactoring for any production code.  Features are always on-going thus they can invalidate the original architecture or design over a long period of time and unit tests/functional tests make it easier to perform many code refactorings and limit things breaking.  The side benefits of unit tests are also identifying bugs even before the code gets into QA’s hands.

Passion is more desirable when it comes to hiring people versus how many open source projects they have done.

Titles are not that important.

Yesterday, I got a ticket that I created an initial solution when I first joined the company a year ago.  It was a defect where animated options that appear from the bottom of the screen once the user taps on a button but when the user rotates the iPad, the animation/view gets distorted.  My solution from a year ago was to dismiss the animated options after detecting rotation.  This was the easiest solution that was best for me but we put the defect on hold since the number of users affected were small and the product owner was not satisfied with the solution.  A better solution was to show the options again after the screen rotation completes.  I thought it was too much effort since it requires some code refactoring; honestly, I was only thinking what was best for me.

So yesterday, I got a chance to work on the same ticket and didn’t take too long to figure out how to implement the better solution.  This is how I know I’m growing my iOS development skills.  Not only that but as a user of the application, I would have appreciated that the app was more user-friendly instead of making me work harder.

Today the results also came back from our internal company’s hackathon called dagathon.  The goal was to increase the most sales/orders purchased via our mobile app and my team won!  We were competing against 34 teams or 24 teams that were able to launch their experiments into production.  Of those 24 teams, only 5 experiments were winners and ours performed the best!  The team was composed of one iOS developer, one designer, and one product owner.  Vasu, the product owner, came up with the idea, Corey designed the feature and made it look good, and I made it happen.  Great team work overall!  It was my first time working with the team members and looking forward to making more features together in the near future.  

My iOS skills and being an individual contributor while making a big impact has made me a happier person today.  I love doing what I’m doing now and will continue doing so.