I had been working as an iOS engineer in Lisbon for three years, and I wanted a company with a more interesting design system.
In my free time I was building a small open-source UI library: three custom controls that I had wanted for years and finally made. About 800 lines of Swift, well documented, with a sample app. I published it in late autumn. I posted about it on Twitter, put it on the iOS subreddit, and emailed a few iOS newsletters, including a small one called Lisbon Mobile that maybe two hundred people in the mobile developer community here read. The editor wrote about it the next week. The lead engineer at a Lisbon software company saw that newsletter. He sent me a DM on Twitter the same day. They had been looking for an iOS engineer for about six weeks and the search was not going well. Would I like to talk? I did. The call was thirty minutes. He had cloned the library, built it, and used one of the controls in a personal project. His questions were about specific decisions I had made: why I used a particular pattern for state management, why one control had that API. We disagreed about one thing. It was the kind of conversation I had wanted to have for two years. The first formal round was a coding test with two ↓