From Engineer to Manager: A Year of Growth and Transformation
It feels like it was yesterday when I became an engineering manager but it has been almost a year. I want to take this time to reflect on the challenges and learnings from this journey.
Benoit Pasquier
Recent content on Benoit Pasquier
Latest posts
Things to know before becoming an Engineering Manager
The journey from individual contributor to engineering manager isn’t always straightforward. Today, I’ll share what it means to become an engineering manager from my point of view, and a few important points to be aware of before making this transition.
Transitioning to an Engineering Manager role
It’s been a while since I haven’t posted anything on my website, it’s because there have been a few changes in 2022 that kept me away from writing. It’s time to resume it.
Security Application Static Analysis applied to iOS and Gitlab CI
Security is a big topic in software engineering but how does it apply to mobile development? We care about user experience or mobile performance, security issues are rarely prioritized. This week, I’ll share how to integrate security tools into your CI pipeline to stay aware of your codebase health.
Being more efficient as a mobile engineer
I was reading this week about “10x engineer” and what it means in the tech industry. If the title can be questionable, I wanted to reflect on its definition and what it can mean in mobile engineering.
When to remove your iOS app from the App Store
For most mobile engineers, the end game is to release our own apps. For the few projects that make it to the App Store, it can be pretty hard to keep them alive over time. Eventually, the question comes up: should I remove my app from the App Store? Today, I’ll share about the thought process that makes me sunset one.
Weak self, a story about memory management and closure in Swift
Memory management is a big topic in Swift and iOS development. If there are plenty of tutorials explaining when to use weak self with closure, here is a short story when memory leaks can still happen with it.
Setting up Auto Layout constraints programmatically in Swift
In iOS development, content alignment and spacing is something that can take a lot of our time. Today, let’s explore how to set constraint with UIKit, update them and resolve constraint conflicts.
Ten years of blogging, one article at a time
Most of people don’t know but I’ve been blogging for some time now. Actually , tomorrow will be ten years. Today is a good time to take a walk on memory lane .
Deep linking and URL scheme in iOS
Opening an app from an URL is such a powerful iOS feature. Its drives users to your app, and can create shortcuts to specific features. This week, we’ll dive into deep linking on iOS and how to create an URL scheme for your app.
Tips and tweaks to integrate Github Action to your iOS project
I’ve been exploring more and more tooling around iOS ecosystem. One tool I really enjoy using those days is Github Action as a continuous integration for my projects. Today we’ll dive into tips and tweaks to make the most of it.
Flutter and fastlane, how to setup an iOS continuous delivery solution
When it comes to iOS development, everybody have their own favorite language and framework: Swift, Objective-C, SwiftUI, React-Native, Flutter and so on. Unlike most of my previous post, today we’re going to leverage some iOS tooling for cross platforms technology: fastlane and Flutter .
Currency TextField in SwiftUI
Between banking and crypto apps, it’s quite often we interact with currency inputs on daily basis. If creating a localized UITextField can already be tricky in UIKit, I was wondering how hard it would be to do a similar one in SwiftUI. Let’s see today how to create a localized currency TextField in SwiftUI.
Open Source checklist for your next Swift library
Like many developers, I use open source tools on daily basis. Recently, I’ve got the chance to create one for other teammates and try to think about what I should consider before launching it. Today I share this checklist.
Unit testing UIView action and gesture in Swift
A big part of the developer journey is make sure our code behaves as expected. It’s best practice to setup tests that allow us to test quickly and often that nothing is broken. If unit testing is common practice to check the business logic, we can also extend it to cover some specific UI behaviors. Let’s how to unit test views and gesture in UIKit .
Dependency injection and Generics to create a modular app in Swift
When we talk about modular app, we rarely mention how complex it can be over time and get out of hand. In most cases, importing frameworks into one another is a reasonable solution but we can do more. Let’s explore how with dependency inversion in Swift and how to create order into our components.
Things I wish I knew in my early coding career
For the past few years, I had the opportunity to mentor new joiners through different roles. In some aspects, I could see myself in them the same way I started years back: eager to prove themselves, jumping on the code and hacking around. I tried to think about what I learnt the hard way since my first role in the tech industry and how could I help them learn the easy way.
Create a web browser with WebKit and SwiftUI
Recently, I’ve been more and more curious about web experience through mobile apps. Most of web browser apps look alike, I was wondering how could I recreate one with WebKit and SwiftUI. Let’s dive in.
Migrating an iOS app to SwiftUI - Database with Realm
To move an existing iOS app codebase to SwiftUI can quickly become a challenge if we don’t scope the difficulties ahead. After covering the navigation and design layer last week, it’s time to dive deeper into the logic and handle the code migration for a database and the user preferences.
Migrating an iOS app to SwiftUI - Navigation & Storyboards
If SwiftUI is great for many things, migrating completely an existing app codebase to it can be really tricky. In a series of blog posts, I’ll share how to migrate an iOS app written in Swift with UIKit to SwiftUI. Today, let’s start with the navigation and the UI components with storyboards.
Creating a webcam utility app for macOS in SwiftUI
Did you ever have to share your screen and camera together? I recently did and it was that easy. How hard could it be to create our own? Today, we’ll code our own webcam utility app for macOS in SwiftUI .
Migrating MVVM architecture from RxSwift to Combine
It’s been almost two years that Combine has been introduced to the Apple developer community. As many developer, you want to migrate your codebase to it. You don’t want to be left behind but you’re not sure where to start, maybe not sure if you want to jump to SwiftUI either. Nothing to worry, let’s see step by step how to migrate an iOS sample app using UIKit and RxSwift…
How to display date and time in SwiftUI
Displaying dates or times is a very common requirement for many apps, often using a specific date formatter. Let’s see what SwiftUI brings to the table to make it easier for developers.
Create a dynamic onboarding UI in Swift
When creating new features, it’s really important to think about how our users will use it. Most of the time, the UI is straightforward enough. However, sometimes, you will want to give some guidance, to highlight a button or a switch, with a message attached. Today, we’ll create a reusable and adaptable overlay in Swift to help onboard mobile users for any of your features.
Goodbye 2020 - A year in perspective
Close to the end of the year, I tend to list what I’ve accomplished but also what didn’t go so well, to help me see what can I do better next year. With couple days early, it’s time to look back at 2020.
How to pass data between views using Coordinator pattern in Swift
A question that comes back often when using Coordinator pattern in iOS development is how to pass data between views. Today I’ll share different approaches for a same solution, regardless if you are using MVVM, MVC or other architectural design pattern.
Automating App Store localized screenshots with XCTest and Xcode Test Plan
One reason I like so much working on native mobile apps is to deliver the user experience based on their region and location. Although, for every update, it can be painful for developers to recapture screenshots foreach available language. Today, I’ll share how to automate this with UI tests and Xcode tools.
Playing Video with AVPlayer in SwiftUI
I’ve been experiencing more and more with SwiftUI and I really wanted to see what we can do with video content. Today I’ll share my findings, showing how to play video using AVFoundation in SwiftUI, including some mistakes to avoid.
With Catalyst and SwiftUI multi-platform, should you create a macOS version of your app?
With Mac Catalyst and SwiftUI support for macOS, Apple has been pushing new tools to the community for the past couple years to create new services on Mac computers. Does it mean you should do too? Here are couple things to consider first.
Create a watchOS app in SwiftUI
Designing a watchOS app in Swift always felt to be quite tricky. I could spend hours tweaking redoing layout and constraints. With SwiftUI supporting watchOS, I wanted to have a new try at it, releasing a standalone app for Apple Watch.
As software engineer, how to face the impostor syndrome?
Shortly stepping back from coding for a week and reading about the community, I realized it how easy it is to be crushed by anxiety: I see so many great things happening every day, things I want to be part of, but at the same time getting anxiety to be good enough. This is my thoughts of how to face the impostor syndrome .
Advanced testing tips in Xcode
In the last couple years, Apple has made some good efforts to improve their testing tools. Today, I’ll walk you through some tips to make sure your test suite run at their best capacity.
Atomic properties and Thread-safe data structure in Swift
A recurring challenge in programming is accessing a shared resource concurrently. How to make sure the code doesn’t behave differently when multiple thread or operations tries to access the same property. In short, how to protect from a race condition?
Deploying your Swift code on AWS Lambda
About a month ago, it became possible to run Swift code on AWS Lambda. I was really interesting to try and see how easy it would be to deploy small Swift functions as serverless application. Let’s see how.
Introduction to MVVM pattern in Objective-C
Even though the iOS ecosystem is growing further every day from Objective-C, some companies still heavily rely on it. A week away for another wave of innovation from WWDC 2020, I thought it would be interesting to dive back into Objective-C starting with a MVVM pattern implementation.
100 day challenge of data structure and algorithm in Swift
Since January, I’ve been slowing down blogging for couple reasons: I started doubting about myself and the quality of my content but I also wanted to focus more on some fundamentals I felt I was missing. So I committed to a “100 day challenge” coding challenge, focused on data structure and algorithm in Swift.
Data Structure - Implementing a Tree in Swift
Following up previous articles about common data structure in Swift, this week it’s time to cover the Tree, a very important concept that we use everyday in iOS development. Let’s dive in.
Using Key-Value Observing in Swift to debug your app
Recently, I was looking into a bug where the UITabBar was inconsistently disappearing on specific pages. I tried different approaches but I couldn’t get where it got displayed and hidden. That’s where I thought about KVO.
Data Structure - Coding a Stack in Swift
After covering last week how to code a Queue in Swift , it sounds natural to move on to the Stack, another really handy data structure which also find his place in iOS development. Let’s see why.
Data Structure - How to implement a Queue in Swift
Recently revisiting computer science fundamentals, I was interested to see how specific data structure applies to iOS development, starting this week one of most common data structure: the queue.
Should I quit blogging?
When I started this blog in 2012, it was at first to share solution to technical problem I encountered on my daily work, to give back to the community. Over the years, I extended the content to other projects and ideas I had. Nowadays, I get more and more feedbacks on it, sometimes good, sometimes bad, either way something always good to learn from.
Start your A/B testing journey with SwiftUI
Last year, I shared a solution to tackle A/B testing on iOS in swift. Now that we have SwiftUI, I want to see if there is a better way to implement A/B testing. Starting from the same idea, I’ll share different implementations to find the best one.
How to make your iOS app smarter with sentiment analysis
For quite some time now, I’ve been developing an interest to data analysis to find new ways to improve mobile app. I’ve recently found some time to experiment neural language processing for a very specific usecase related to my daily work, sentiment analysis of customer reviews on fashion items.
Localization with SwiftUI, how to preview your localized content
With SwiftUI being recently introduced, I was curious if we could take advantage of SwiftUI preview to speed up testing localization and make sure your app looks great for any language.
SwiftUI - What has changed in your MVVM pattern implementation
Introduced in 2019, Apple made UI implementation much simpler with With SwiftUI its UI declarative framework. After some time experiencing with it, I’m wondering today if MVVM is still the best pattern to use with. Let’s see what has changed, implementing MVVM with SwiftUI.
Data Structure and Algorithm applied to iOS
When asked about data structure and algorithm for an iOS development role, there is always this idea that it’s not a knowledge needed. Swift got already native data structure, right? Isn’t the rest only UI components? That’s definitely not true. Let’s step back and discuss about data structure and algorithm applied to iOS development.
How to integrate Redux in your MVVM architecture
For last couple years, I’ve been experimenting different architectures to understand pros and cons of each one of them. Redux architecture is definitely one that peek my curiosity. In this new post, I’ll share my finding pairing Redux with MVVM, another pattern I’m familiar with and more importantly why you probably shouldn’t pair them.
Software engineer, it's okay to not have a side project
There is a believe that any software developer must contribute or have a side project to work on. Even if it’s great to have, I think there is something bigger at stake doing that.
How to build a modular architecture in iOS
Over time, any code base grows along with the project evolves and matures. It creates two main constraints for developers: how to have a code well organized while keeping a build time as low as possible. Let’s see how a modular architecture can fix that .
Analytics - How to avoid common mistakes in iOS
I have been interested in analytics tools for a while, especially when it’s applied to mobile development. Over the time, I saw many code mistakes when implementing an analytical solution. Some of them can be easily avoided when developer got the right insights, let’s see how.