In the spring of 2018, in the span of only a few minutes, my two-decade career as a progressive Mac IT Engineer was razed to its very foundations. A mindless decision by some middling middle manager at an ancient internet company ended it faster – and more completely – than I would have thought possible.
They didn’t even fire me.
The few years leading up to that had been lightning in a bottle for me. After some soul searching, and despite my bitterness and outrage over this turn of events, I knew how unlikely it was to find that again.
The best way for me to grow from there was to change paths. My next path, I decided, was the one I’d been teasing myself with since the introduction of the App Store: I would transform myself into an iOS Developer.
A New Path
To get there, professionally, I needed to plot a course through more familiar territory. In the fall of 2018, then, I joined our Release Engineering team. For more than two years, I became our iOS Release expert, working closely with our iOS Core platform team to develop and improve our iOS release strategies and get to know the developers and the codebase intimately.
Then, in the late winter of 2021, I finally made the jump to full-time iOS development as part of the iOS Core platform team that I had been supporting. Since then, I’ve been able to learn iOS development at scale, on a massive codebase, all while bringing my extensive background in release engineering and automation, along with more than two decades of making sure people are at the center of everything I do.
A Detour
Only a couple of months after I made this transition, the Release Engineering team I had been part of disbanded. The vacuum this left in our development process was substantial, even if it wasn’t felt immediately, and I found that my old release engineering skills were once again in demand. Increasingly, my iOS developer colleagues were finding themselves blocked by ever-mounting issues with CI. This presents me with a difficult decision. I have an ability among the iOS developers at my company that is unique: I have the experience and administrator privileges to debug and resolve CI problems – I can unblock my colleagues.
The problem for me is that release engineering is “iOS development” adjacent. It demands a deep understanding of all kinds of things that are related to iOS development. It just doesn’t require any actual iOS development. I don’t have to debug any Swift, decipher any massive view controllers, rewrite Objective-C, or track down any memory leaks. It was Ruby, and Fastlane, and yaml files, and 20+ iOS developers that were dead in the water behind a problem I could probably sort out myself without waiting for our Infrastructure team.
This tug-of-war issue continues to this day, although to a lesser degree. Despite my best efforts to limit this cross-over time, and with the full support of my team lead in doing so, I have spent much more time than I’d meant to in areas that haven’t helped me develop my skills as an iOS developer.
Returning to My Path
Starting January 1, 2024, this tug-of-war ends. I will be joining a brand-new iOS developer team on a brand-new project. My institutional knowledge about CI automation is related to my current product, which I won’t be supporting. We won’t have a sprawling, million-line project, or any of the “scale issues” (and CI issues) that come with it.
In fact, for a variety of reasons it has already effectively ended. For the next few weeks, I will be wrapping up my time here and preparing for my new team.
It is in this moment, this moment of profound change and re-focus, that something perfectly serendipitous has happened to me. I have found an opportunity to focus my training through an online course that I’ve been curious about for months: the iOS Lead Essentials course from Essential Developers.
I’m signed up and ready to start. And I cannot wait.
Follow along in my journey.