Looking for a grizzled, bloodied iOS engineer to learn from

August 30, 2021 7:29 PM

I am a grizzled, bloodied embedded systems engineer. I’ve been poked by just about every pointy bit in the software development process from architecture to design to code to tools. I have emerged from the process with a solid conviction on how to do all of it The Right Way. I would like to meet my iOS counterpart, or even better multiple counterparts who strongly disagree with each other. Can anyone help point me to such people?
posted by Tell Me No Lies to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Response by poster: (I was thinking about how to identify these people and I think the rule is “no matter what they’re talking about the fact that it will break, and how to debug it is frequently on their mind.”)
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:02 PM on August 30, 2021 [2 favorites]

I've been looking to do something similar recently, whilst moving to a new software stack yet wanting to build a production-ready application.

I haven't signed up yet, but have been looking at codementor.io, which seems promising. Here are their results for iOS devs, though you would likely want to add additional filters, such as "architectural design" to narrow it down further.
posted by Gomez_in_the_South at 11:02 PM on August 30, 2021

I think the grizzled iOS veterans will be also macOS app developers who can talk about when NextStep became Cocoa, how Apple sidestepped OpenGL and the pros/cons of Metal, whether Swift is a genuine peer to Golang, Rust and Kotlin. Don't get them started about the 30% in-app charges for sales in your app or the black box review and approval process for actually getting your product into the App Store.

I think the shibboleth is grumpiness about the annual App Store registration fee -- even for projects that are stable and rarely needing an update there's a fee that is essentially for updating your signing credentials in the PKI infrastructure -- maybe it's about having no control over the review process when you submit an App.
posted by k3ninho at 12:04 AM on August 31, 2021 [1 favorite]

I’d perhaps try this Slack. You can get a lot of questions answered. It skews a bit indie dev/consultancy but you should be able to connect with developers who work on one product, which in my experience are going to have spent more of their time optimizing lower level problems.
posted by michaelh at 1:52 PM on August 31, 2021 [1 favorite]