iOS Engineer at a Lisbon software company: an open-source UI library got picked up by a local newsletter
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, why one control had the API surface it did. We disagreed on one thing. It was the kind of conversation I'd wanted to be having for two years. The first formal round was a coding screen with two of their senior engineers. A small refactor of a real piece of their codebase, two hours. I shipped a clean implementation with one small extension they hadn't asked for but that I thought 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 in advance and asked me to be ready to review it. I came with ten comments. About half were right, two were wrong, and three opened up a discussion that ate the rest of the hour. Good interview. Round three was a culture round with the head of product and the lead designer. Less an interview, more a conversation about how the team worked and what success looked like. The offer was €50,000 base. I asked for €54,000, citing my current comp and the relocation impact. They came back at €52,000 plus a small relocation help. I accepted. Seven weeks of searching, nine applications. Eight of those went out before the library got picked up. The ninth was the role at the company, which I applied to formally after the chat with the lead, more paperwork than application. The library is still open-source. I should probably write more of them.