The library wasn't a job application. I keep having to remind myself of that, because it ended up being the most effective job application I've ever sent. I'd been working as an iOS engineer in Lisbon for three years and was quietly looking for somewhere with a more interesting design system. On the side I'd been tinkering with a small open-source UI library: three custom controls I'd wanted to exist for years and had finally gotten around to building. About 800 lines of Swift, well documented, with a sample app. I posted it in late autumn. Tweeted about it, put it on the iOS subreddit, emailed a few iOS newsletters, including a small one called Lisbon Mobile that maybe two hundred people in the city's mobile dev scene read. The editor wrote it up the following week. The lead engineer at a Lisbon software company saw that newsletter post. He DMed me on Twitter the same day. They'd been hiring an iOS engineer for about six weeks and the search wasn't going well. Would I be open to a chat? I was. The chat ran thirty minutes. He'd cloned the library, built it, and integrated one of the controls into a side project of his. His questions were specific to decisions I'd made: why I'd used a particular pattern for state management, ↓
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