Hello 👋. I’m Oliver, and I’m a software engineer and designer. I build primarily for Apple platforms. For the past 20-ish years, I’ve principally worked as a freelancer / contractor / consultant (if you know the difference please let me know!). I was also a department head at one agency, a senior engineer at another, and a professional tutor, for a time.
My biggest regret over the past two decades is how little I’ve given back to the community.
I think I take for granted how much knowledge is shared within the community of software engineers. I wonder how common it is in other industries? Can civil engineers google for “how to build a suspension bridge?” Can cinematographers google for “how to achieve the dolly/zoom effect used in Severance?”
I think I always assumed that people who open-source code, or write about design or engineering, knew more than I did or were simply better at it. I think, like many people, I had imposter syndrome. So, I was always waiting for someone to tap me on the shoulder and say, “Please come with us, Sir”, and I would be escorted out of the building. And so, attracting attention to myself by openly participating in the community seemed to go against any survival instincts I may have had.
But, I’ve been in the industry for too long, and I’m too old (my bones hurt sometimes), to continue to behave this way.
So, Why Build in Public?
There are, of course, many ways that I could give back. But, in the same way that writers are told to write the stories they want to read, I would have loved to read whole accounts of how apps are made, back when I was coming up.
There are thousands of decisions made when building an app of reasonable complexity. And many, if not most, of the those decisions can have wide-ranging affects. The more experienced we are, the more we take for granted the decisions that we are making, and often aren’t even aware when we’re doing so.
Most importantly, things can seem simple and obvious when you’re on the inside, but things can seem mysterious and important from the outside. Also, if you design and engineer something to feel inevitable, people will often wonder if you did anything at all. From a consumer perspective, this is fine. Good, even. But from the perspective of someone trying to learn, this is unhelpful. It reminds me of the four types of knowledge. What you don’t know that you don’t know is the hardest knowledge to acquire.
So, I’m going to build in public. So people can see that there is no magic, nor is there any super secret knowledge that only cool people know about. It’s mostly just a lot of typing. And that there are no right answers, only choices.
So, What Are You Building?
I will be building an RSS reader for iPhone (and iPad). I may expand it to the Mac, and possibly even other platforms later on, but I have to start somewhere. And, as most people’s primary computer is their smartphone, these days, it seems like a good place to start.
My hope is that most of what I’ll be writing about won’t be specific to iOS, but rather about the design, engineering and product choices of building a piece of commercial consumer-facing software in 2025. So, if you don’t work on Apple platforms, hopefully this will still be useful to you too.
Why an RSS reader? I’ll write more about that in Part 2.