Empowering iOS Developers

Given at MobileEra in Oslo on November 8, 2019

Transcript

1. Empowering iOS
   Developers
   Samuel Giddins
   Empowering iOS Developers – Samuel Giddins @ MobileEra 2019 1
   

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2. Samuel Giddins
   Mobile Developer Experience @ Square
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3. Formerly:
   ‣ iOS Open Source
   ‣ RubyGems
   ‣ Bundler
   ‣ Realm
   ‣ CocoaPods
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4. What do all these all have in common?
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5. What do all these all have in common?
   Building tools for other developers
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6. Why build tools?
   ‣ Higher leverage
   ‣ Building things for those sitting around me
   ‣ Easier to do open source / share
   ‣ It's a unique skillset that's less common
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7. So, what about this topic has to do with iOS Developers?
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8. (Quick) Trip through history
   ‣ Pre-2.0
   ‣ Only jailbreak apps
   ‣ A few years of small apps
   ‣ Lots of apps built by agencies / consultancies
   ‣ iOS 7
   ‣ Everyone rewrote everything
   ‣ Apps got big
   ‣ Now
   ‣ Multinational companies base their business off of mobile apps
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9. The largest iOS apps are bigger than some small companies'
   entire codebases (across all engineering disciplines)
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10. Think
    ‣ Facebook
    ‣ Instagram
    ‣ Gmail
    ‣ Airbnb
    ‣ Uber
    ‣ Square
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11. Even the smallest apps have gotten bigger,
    as platform expectations have grown
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12. Before Now
    Nav bar & table view Rich collections
    Pixel-perfect PNGs Scalable designs
    CRUD APIs Instant syncing
    Multitasking
    Extensions
    Multiple input options
    State restoration
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13. I work on a massive app.
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14. I work on a massive app.
    We have 480+ source files.
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15. I work on a massive app.
    We have 480+ source files.
    We have 480+ modules.
    Some of which have hundreds of files.
    Then there are the tests.
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16. I work on a massive app 6 massive apps.
    Business reasons dictate we have multiple apps
    (and a couple of SDKs!)
    all built on a common platform.
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17. Built by
    ‣ Multiple engineering teams
    ‣ across a half dozen different offices
    ‣ spanning different organizations in the company
    ‣ each with their own product managers & designers
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18. 90% of those teams are responsible for
    shipping features
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19. I’m in the 10%.
    I ship features to everyone else.
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20. Server engineers hit this scale a long long time ago,
    they had a solution called platform engineering
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21. Platform Engineering
    mix of devops stuff and writing frameworks
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22. Platform Engineering
    Took longer on mobile because getting to scale took longer
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23. All we need is what
     gives us!
    1
    The i
    OS Community
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24. Then Now
    1-3 people collaborating on a
    single app, in their free time
    four thousand person
    business making money
    primarily through their apps
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25. What can we provide?
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26. What can we provide?
    Look to what server folks did!
    ‣ Developer environment
    ‣ Write some tests
    ‣ CI / automated testing setup
    ‣ Automated deployment
    ‣ “Frameworks”
    ‣ Task automation
    ‣ Build systems
    ‣ IDEs
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27. The goal:
    allow engineers to
    focus on building product
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28. Make the path from product managers & designers to the
    built app be as easy as possible
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29. If you work on a small team, this may sound strange
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30. If you work on a small team, this may sound strange
    but think of all the small parts of your job you try to ignore
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31. ‣ Updating to new Xcode versions
    ‣ Keeping the build passing
    ‣ Uploading builds to testflight / the appstore
    ‣ Investigating Xcode doing something silly
    ‣ Speeding up a slow build
    ‣ Updating network request / response code
    ‣ Protobufs!
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32. As you reach a certain team size,
    it makes sense to invest in expertise
    in those kinds of problems
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33. There’s something in here for anyone to learn (regardless of team size)
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34. For every complaint you see about something getting in the way
    see if you can invest in a permanant fix
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35. everyday frustrations of being a developer pile up
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37. No matter how many engineers you have,
    these frustrations are real costs your team faces
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39. Every time master is red, someone has to go and look at why
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40. hey, not to be a broken
    record, but i had to rebuild
    the same commit 27 times
    (no rebases, exact same SHA)
    to get a green build last night
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41. github.com/square/refinement
    Selective test execution
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42. I was on vacation
    !
    for a bit and came back this
    week and noticed that my builds were super fast!
    Sometimes I'd see some builds take 30-45 minutes
    (where I'd typically modify things that only touch
    Retail) but have noticed them go down to about 5
    minutes (except for ALL, but this went from 1h+ to
    about 30 minutes, with is still huge)! Just wanna
    say how awesome that is
    "
    , seeing the reduced build
    times have me nurse PRs with less time, and I
    presume freeing resources for other folks
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43. Seller Monorepo Cash Monorepo
    With 0 involvement from me
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45. Built for Scale
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46. This kind of migration takes a lot of effort, and requires
    building up lots of specialized knowledge.
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47. This kind of migration takes a lot of effort, and requires
    building up lots of specialized knowledge.
    Just like you wouldn’t ask a java server engineer to build up
    your table views,
    it’d be a mistake to have an iOS developer replace your build
    system
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48. Projects like this require a combination of
    ownership & expertise
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49. At Square, the Platform Engineering team is over 100 people
    for server
    Our MDX team is 2 for iOS and 4 for Android
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50. Investing in these areas allows us to scale
    A team of 50 total mobile engineers to over 150
    1 app to over half a dozen
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51. no matter the team size,
    investing in increased productivity
    & developer happiness is worth it
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53. Samuel Giddins
    @segiddins
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