Ordnance Survey
I worked on the flagship OS Maps app, and was the lead developer on the “off-road routing” functionality (satellite navigation for national parks). This involved building custom UI, memory and performance tuning to handle very large routes whilst maintaining 60 FPS scrolling, and creating a custom GPX schema to be used to allow synchronisation of routes between the iOS, Android, and web versions of the app.
I also worked on custom UI components, transitions and animations, as well as creating an adaptive user interface that allows the app to scale gracefully from the iPhone 4s up to the iPad Pro.
I was also responsible for UX improvements to the Offline Maps feature to allow users to easily discover and manage their offline map downloads, as well as engineering a completely new menu design for the app. Whilst working on the project I helped to increase the unit test coverage to 85%.
Kingfisher (B&Q)
At Kingfisher I worked on the greenfield “Brilliant Basics” project to build a brand new iOS app for B&Q that would be built in a white-label fashion to be rolled out across Europe for various different retailers under the Kingfisher umbrella.
My primary contribution to the project aside from day-to-day development was the creation of a UI toolkit used to develop custom user interface elements in isolation from the main application codebase. This toolkit ranged from customised buttons and controls right up to bespoke containment view controllers, an API for building data collection forms, and a message presentation mechanism that could be seamlessly integrated in to any UI.
I also focussed on the core iOS platform experience, which lead to the integration of Spotlight search support for items a user had viewed in the app, and the ability to trigger searches in the app from the iOS system search screen. Application Shortcuts were another feature I added to allow users to initiate product searches or scan barcodes from the app’s icon on the home screen.
One other piece of functionality I built was a tool for measuring the area of walls and floors using ARKit to aid in the calculation of the quantity of a product needed to cover the measured surface. This involved more custom user interface work as well as interaction with SceneKit to detect and measure 2D planes from points placed by the user in 3D space.
Shpock
- Completed the renovation of the analytics implementation to provide 100% code coverage to give the business certainty over the app's analytics metrics.
- Worked with the design team to build and implement an app-first design system to modernise and streamline UI development with custom-built native components.
- Introduced modern design patterns such as dependency injection to aid with unit testing.
- Up-skilled the other members of the team to allow them to: write unit tests, better understand common iOS SDK components, how to build custom view controllers and views in accordance with the principles of the iOS SDK.
- Built new backend-driven product listing features involving hierarchical lists of value types constructed using polymorphic deserialisation, including graceful handling of unknown data types.
- Added support for Rich push notifications.
101 Ways
I lead the renovation project for a household name e-commerce client's iOS app, which included:
- Building a CI/CD pipeline from scratch that allowed for apps to be built and delivered automatically to Firebase for QA and to the App Store for release using git tags. This was made particularly difficult to achieve by the use of private Swift Packages resolved over HTTPS, which is not supported by xcodebuild without previously adding credentials to Xcode. As this can not be done in a remote-hosted virtual machine environment, a step was added to re-write the git URLs to fetch the packages via SSH instead.
- Refactored the entire analytics implementation to make it easier to use at a code level and provided 100% unit test coverage of the implementation.
- Added the first unit tests to the project in order to be able to refactor legacy code whilst maintaining existing behaviour.
- Debugged and fixed complex crashes in the app relating to memory corruption induced by unsafe multi-threaded code.