The 3 AM Rebase That Broke the Release It was two days before a release deadline. The feature branch had been in flight for three months — long enough for the main branch to accumulate over 1,500 commits from five other teams. The lead engineer started a rebase on Thursday
A Mobile Safe-Rollout Playbook Feature flags are usually pitched as "turn features on and off." That's the junior version. The senior version: Feature flags are an operational safety system. They let you ship changes gradually, observe impact, and recover quickly when reality wins. On mobile, this
The Mobile/Server Contract for "Effectively-Once" Actions Mobile networks fail. Users double-tap. Apps get backgrounded. Radios switch towers. Requests time out even when the server completed the work. When your client "just retries," you can accidentally apply the same action twice. That's how you
Most concurrency bugs in iOS apps aren't exotic. They're mundane: * "Results show for the previous search term." * "User navigated away, but the request finishes and updates state anyway." * "Two requests race; the slower one wins." * "Logout happens, but background
How do we decode messy, inconsistent API payloads into clean domain models without turning every model into custom boilerplate? Real APIs rarely look like your Swift types. Keys drift (full_name, fullName, FullName). Payloads wrap ({ "data": { … } }). Teams ship versioned responses with "legacy" fields still hanging around.
Yes—but it's not the win people think it is. If you measure "better code" as fewer style violations and lower complexity, then ChatGPT helps. If you measure "better code" as correctness under constraints, long-term maintainability, and sound judgment, the answer is more complicated.
The biggest architectural mistake in high-security mobile apps is treating the client as trusted by default. The reality is adversarial: devices get rooted, apps get cloned and repackaged, bots automate flows, and runtime instrumentation can alter behavior without touching your backend. Attestation changes this conversation—not because you must go
Scrum doesn't fail because engineers can't estimate. It fails because organizations can't protect focus and respect decision rights. When those two things break, Scrum turns into theater: * the Daily becomes a status meeting, * the Sprint "commitment" becomes fiction, * the backlog stops reflecting
Most apps don’t have a navigation problem. They have a process problem. “Which screen comes next?” is usually a side-effect of something deeper: * Did we hydrate from disk? * Are we authenticated? * Is the network reachable? * Did we complete onboarding? * Did we satisfy required permissions? * Did the backend acknowledge the
Most interview loops still test whether you can build a list view. Reality tests whether your system can survive change. That’s where code smells matter—not as moral judgement (“bad dev”), but as risk signals: indicators that the design is drifting toward higher maintenance cost and lower change velocity.