A Framework to Make Decisions Faster as a Lead Software Engineer
A practical guide for lead engineers to make faster, better-informed decisions under pressure.
TIL with Mohammad
Recent content on TIL with Mohammad
Latest posts
How to Use Git Worktree? And How It's used by AI Agents?
How does git worktree work and how it helps AI agents work faster and without conflicts
When to Use AGENTS.override.md?
You'd usually use an AGENTS.override.md for ad hoc purposes
xcodebuild for AI
I’m running into some issues with the project setup Claude came up for me and I’m triaging it now. It’s using xcodebuild which prompted me to write this post. Prerequisite Highly recommend to acquaint yourself with the following definitions: Project Target Scheme Action Destination Product For that see my stackoverflow answer to: Xcode: What is a target and scheme in plain…
How the mental cost of AI can be reduced over time and type of usage?
Why every AI guardrail shouldn't be just about cost, privacy and security but emotional well being, plus the inflection point that reduces asking questions and begins increasing AI delegation, anchoring (through the usage of specs) and joy.
Part 1 - State Drive Nagiation: Overview
Why direct view-to-view navigation breaks down at scale, and how a state machine with a dedicated navigation layer creates maintainable, testable mobile apps.
Part 2 - State Driven Navigation: Tutorial
Dead simple, concrete examples of state-driven navigation. Build a 3-screen onboarding flow from scratch.
What does actor reentrancy mean?
If you captured any state before doing some async work in your actor, then by the time your task is resumed, your captured state may be stale. This is what actor reentrancy is about. Because of this, you should avoid capturing things that are subject to change before your task is suspended. Instead, only retrieve values after your task is resumed. The term “reentrant” literally means…
Systems Design - Pagination
How does Base 64, cursor collision, security, deletion of a cursor all come together, caching and stale data management
High Level Anatomy of a Camera Capturing Session
I used the following tutorial series from Apple on ‘Capturing and Displaying Photos’. They’re great. Just that it took me a bit to be able to piece together how components from AVFoundation work together. Working with AVFoundation isn’t really the kind where you read documentation and then can piece things together. It’s complicated. You might understand an individual…
What Is a Suspension Point In Swift?
Ever wondered what is getting suspended when Apple says 'suspension point'?
Live Activities Part 1 - Problem Statement
A laundry list on Live Activity challenges
Live Activities Part 2 - The missing doc
Let's answer some lesser discussed architectural questions about Live Activities
Live Activities Part 3 - Development
Some tips for developing live activities and understanding its architecture
Live Activities Part 4 - Debugging
Sharing some tips on how to troubleshoot cases where tokens aren't getting updated or payload isn't getting updated. Or often payload is delivered but dropped by the app.
Live Activities Part 5 - The Update Token Problem
Key product decisions that may help to achieve a better Live Activity User Experience
Swift Actors: few random notes
Curious about why Swift's thread-safety mechanism is called an 'actor'? This post explores the origin of the name, clarifies common misconceptions, and explains why actors are about more than just asynchronous programming. Discover when to use actors in your Swift code and how they fit into the broader concurrency landscape
Interviewing - Final Round Learnings
Discuss all aspects of interview
Symmetric Tree
A good tree traversal excercise
Separate Devices, Better Life: Why Personal Freedom Beats Using Your Work MacBook
Why having your own personal laptop is a game changer
How to Get Into Software Engineering
most people think you need to study four years to get a job in tech. That's not true
Why Can't You Loop Over Ranges of Characters in Swift
Why are Swift Character ranges different from Integer ranges
How Quantifying Impact Helps Your Career Growth
Often as engineers we do ourselves a disservice and just do the hard work without measuring its impact. This post gives you strategies to promote yourself
How Do Binaries work together? What breaks ABI?
Ever wondered what how two binaries interface with one another? Which changes impact ABI and which don't?
Some vs Any
What's the difference between some and any? Why do they both exist? Which should I prefer using?
Hugo Post Formatting Basics
How to use frontmatter, shortcodes, make changes to your theme, do syntax highlighting
Hugo High Level
How does Hugo work? How are things structured? What are the main building blocks of Hugo?
Being First is a Game Changer
Being a good lead is a lot about being first
The effect of direction on recursion and understanding code - Longest Common Subsequence
Solve a fun challenged named 'Longest Common Subsequence' by learning how the direction in recursion can effect your perception but also make comparing code difficult
Asteroids Collision
Of the most fun leetcode challenges I've ever done
How Many Envelopes Can You Fit Into Another?
Learn how to solve a challenging problem from LeetCode using dynamic programming and binary search. Find the longest increasing sequence of envelopes that can be nested inside each other.
Longest Increasing Subsequence Length
Learn how to calculate the longest increasing subsequence. The differences of this with other tree based algorithms and more
Tips for post creation
Discussion about when you should start blogging, the importance of getting early feedback and how to get it, how to market your posts and more
Tree Basics and some Swift helpers for leetcode
Some gotchas with different kinds of trees, tree mappings and traversals
How Can I Inspect the Size Impact of Symbols in an App Binary: A Practical Guide for Apple Developers
Learn how to use nm to count extra symbols that impact App Size
Optimizing Binaries - How Does the Linker Help Reduce App Size? What are the different types of linking - Part Two
In this post I go through some of differences between the two linkers, their impact on app size and how we should be considerate of stripping symbols
Optimizing Binaries - How Does the Linker Help Reduce App Size? What are the different types of linking - Part One
In this post I extract all the good chunks from Apple's fantastic session on linker and how it does things to reduce app size. I also discuss some of the difference between Compiler and Linker
Optimizing Binaries - Build Pipeline Jargon
Jargons and Examples of the Xcode Build Pipeline
Optimizing Binaries - High Level Xcode Build Pipeline
Ever thought what happens under the hood when you build your app?
Whats the Difference Between an App (bundle) and a Binary
How the their internals are different and where they're used
The power and expressiveness of Swift ranges
Ranges in swift are super simple to create. Yet they come in various forms. let r1 = 1...3 let r2 = 1..<3 let r3 = ...3 let r4 = 3... let r5 = ..<3 They all have range like characteristics, but have slightly different traits. It’s because they’re actually different types. Different Range Types let r1 = 1...3 // ClosedRange<Int> let r2 = 1..<3 // Range<Int> let r3 = ...3 //…
How cp case-insensitivity can cause chaos!
How cp ends up being dangerous...!
How to Think Recursively - Part 2
How to break down a recursive question into smaller pieces. Sophisticated Question.
How to Think Recursively - Part 1
How to break down a recursive question into smaller pieces. Easy Question
Why does pod lib lint suddenly fail to build?
Why might pod lib lint fail to build while the app itself builds fine?
How Understanding State Machines Helps With Building Trees and Graphs
A different way of seeing tree explorations
What Resources Does Apple Provide for teaching iOS to students?
Buried deep under Apple's K-12 resources?
Which Way Am I Sorting?
Ever confused as to what the end result of your sorting is?
Recover Binary Tree
How do you fix a broken binary tree?
How to Calculate the Middle Index?
Are middle indexes always actually the middle index?