A shift towards product development

Working on building tools for developers has helped me realize that what I like even more than coding is going through the product thinking process. That’s why I’m so engaged building Tuist, and recently Galaxy.

I used to be excited by playing with technology itself. SwiftUI? Oh! I want to test that out and see how it feels. A new reactive framework? I want to add it to my app and see how it compares to RxSwift. However, that’s no longer the case. I see technology as a mean provide something to the users and tackle problems/needs they might have. And the side effect of this shift is that I don’t worry anymore about having to keep up with the latest with the latest. Instead, my focus is on users, what do they need?

I enjoy seeing how developers work at Shopify and wondering what kind of tools we could build to help them. I also enjoy seeing developers joining Tuist’s Slack group and bring new interesting challenges I didn’t think about before.

These are questions that I often ask myself:

• How can I make convenient inconvenient steps of developing apps with Xcode?
• How should Tuist’s website design be to convey the ideas behind the project?
• What can I do to build a healthy and engaging community of users?
• What can I do to reach those developers that still struggle to scale up their Xcode projects?
• How can I solve challenging problems like reliable team signing of apps or faster builds?
• How can I make sure we don’t disregard little details that make the user experience using Tuist great?

In a recent interview at Shopify, someone asked me what I like from my job. I did not expect that question, but I could answer it without thinking twice: I like to make complex things simple.

That’s what I’ve enjoyed doing at Shopify and with Tuist, and that I’ll continue exploring further in the next few years.

By the way, I just got a book on Web Typography because I want to understand how different typographies influence the way a design is perceived.