iOS Engineer at a Lisbon software company: an open-source UI library got picked up by a local newsletter
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 of their senior engineers. A small refactor of real code from their product, two hours. I delivered a clean implementation, plus one small extension they had not asked for, because I thought it made sense. They said the extension was the part they liked. Round two was a code review session. They sent me a piece of their code before, and asked me to be ready to review it. I came with ten comments. About half were correct, two were wrong, and three started a discussion that used the rest of the hour. Good interview. Round three was a culture round with the head of product and the lead designer. It was less an interview and more a conversation about how the team worked and what success meant there. The offer was €50,000 base. I asked for €54,000 and explained my current salary and the cost of relocation. They came back at €52,000 and a small relocation payment. I said yes. Seven weeks of searching, nine applications. Eight of them I sent before the newsletter wrote about the library. The ninth was this company, and I applied formally after the call with the lead engineer, which was more paperwork than a real application. The library is still open source. I should write more of them.