Alberto De Bortoli

CLI manager

How to Implement a Decentralised CLI Tool Manager

A design to implement a simple, generic and decentralised manager for CLI tools from the perspective of a Swift dev.

swift

How to setup a Swift Package Registry in Artifactory

A quick guide to setting up a Swift Package Registry with Artifactory to speed up builds and streamline dependency management.

CI Featured

Scalable Continuous Integration for iOS

How Just Eat Takeaway.com leverage AWS, Packer, Terraform and GitHub Actions to manage a CI stack of macOS runners.

The idea of a Fastlane replacement

Prelude Fastlane is widely used by iOS teams all around the world. It became the standard de facto to automate common tasks such as building apps, running tests, and uploading builds to App Store Connect. Fastlane has been recently moved under the Mobile Native Foundation which is amazing as Google

CloudWatch dashboards and alarms on Mac instances

CloudWatch is great for observing and monitoring resources and applications on AWS, on premises, and on other clouds. While it's trivial to have the agent running on Linux, it's a bit more involved for mac instances (which are commonly used as CI workers). The support was

Easy connection to AWS Mac instances with EC2macConnector

Overview Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides EC2 Mac instances commonly used as CI workers. Configuring them can be either a manual or an automated process, depending on the DevOps and Platform Engineering experience in your company. No matter what process you adopt, it is sometimes useful to log into the

Toggles: the easiest feature flagging in Swift

I previously wrote about JustTweak here. It's the feature flagging mechanism we've been using at Just Eat Takeaway.com to power the iOS consumer apps since 2017. It's proved to be very stable and powerful and it has evolved over time. Friends have heard

iOS

The Continuous Integration system used by the mobile teams

In this article, we’ll discuss the way our mobile teams have evolved the Continuous Integration (CI) stack over the recent years.

iOS

iOS Monorepo & CI Pipelines

We have presented our modular iOS architecture in a previous article and I gave a talk at Swift Heroes 2020 about it. In this article, we’ll analyse the challenges we faced to have the modular architecture integrated with our CI pipelines and the reasoning behind migrating to a monorepo.

music

The algorithm powering iHarmony

Problem I wrote the first version of iHarmony in 2008. It was the very first iOS app I gave birth to, combining my passion for music and programming. I remember buying an iPhone and my first Mac with the precise purpose of jumping on the apps train at a time

iOS

The iOS internationalization basics I keep forgetting

Localizations, locales, timezones, date and currency formatting... it's shocking how easy is to forget how they work and how to use them correctly. In this article, I try to summarize the bare minimum one needs to know to add internationalization support to an iOS app.

iOS Featured

Modular iOS Architecture @ Just Eat

The journey we took to restructure our mobile apps towards a modular architecture. Originally published on the Just Eat Engineering Blog. Overview Modular mobile architectures have been a hot topic over the past 2 years, counting a plethora of articles and conference talks. Almost every big company promoted and discussed

iOS

Lessons learned from handling JWT on mobile

> Implementing Authorization on mobile can be tricky. Here are some recommendations to avoid common issues. Originally published on the Just Eat Engineering Blog [https://tech.just-eat.com/2019/12/04/lessons-learned-from-handling-jwt-on-mobile/] . Overview Modern mobile apps are more complicated than they used to be back in the early days and

iOS

A Smart Feature Flagging System for iOS

At Just Eat we have experimentation and feature flagging at our heart and we've developed a component, named JustTweak, to make things easier on iOS.

deep links

Deep Linking at Scale on iOS

> How the iOS team at Just Eat built a scalable architecture to support navigation and deep linking. Originally published on the Just Eat Engineering Blog [https://tech.just-eat.com/2019/04/16/deep-linking-at-scale-on-ios/]. In this article, we propose an architecture to implement a scalable solution to Deep Linking on

manifesto

Principal Manifesto

Edit: in 2020, Will Larson published Staff Engineer, the first book that properly reasons about Staff+ roles. I cannot recommend the book, the articles, and the podcast enough. You can find all about them at staffeng.com. To extend the tech career ladder, a number of roles have been introduced

iOS

The easiest State Machine in Swift

Here's another article of the serie "The easiest <something>". Previous ones on Core Data (The easiest Core Data [https://albertodebortoli.com/2016/08/05/the-easiest-core-data/]) and Future and Promises (The easiest promises in Swift [https://albertodebortoli.com/2018/02/12/the-easiest-promises-in-swift/]). It was a

unit tests

The template for View Controller unit testing

Hot topics like this one, testing view controllers, often come back from time to time and get some updates. It probably all started with Testing View Controllers [https://www.objc.io/issues/1-view-controllers/testing-view-controllers/] by Daniel Eggert back in 2013. Now quite out-dated as in Objective-C and showing examples of

promises

The easiest Promises in Swift

Here's another article of the serie "The easiest <something>". Previous one on Core Data here -> The easiest Core Data [https://albertodebortoli.com/2016/08/05/the-easiest-core-data/]. Swift 5 will most likely include async/await, which will be a revolution for handling concurrency

Singleton

The recipe for Singletons removal

We all went through it, am I right? You join a new company, you jump on the new codebase, you find lots of singletons, get used to them, become friend with them, but after some time you realize it's time to terminate the friendship. For a greater good.

Core Data

How to abstract your persistence layer on iOS with JustPersist

The original post is published on the Just Eat tech blog at this URL [http://tech.just-eat.com/2017/03/02/how-to-abstract-your-persistence-layer-and-migrate-to-another-one-on-ios-with-justpersist/] . In this blog post we introduce a solution to deal with data persistence. We developed it for the Just Eat iOS app and we call it JustPersist. It’

logging

A better local and remote logging on iOS with JustLog

The original post is published on the Just Eat tech blog at this URL [http://tech.just-eat.com/2017/01/18/a-better-local-and-remote-logging-on-ios-with-justlog/] . In this blog post we introduce the solution for local and remote logging we developed for the Just Eat iOS app. It’s named JustLog and it’s

Core Data

The easiest Core Data

Over the past months I spent a lot of time on Core Data, I had to deal with a project with a lot of legacy code, Core Data horros and multithreading violations. Core Data is hard, at times it can be frustrating and confusing. For this reasons, I decided to

Testing

Offline UI testing on iOS with stubs

The original post is published on the Just Eat tech blog at this URL [http://tech.just-eat.com/2015/11/23/offline-ui-testing-on-ios-with-stubs/]. Here at Just Eat, while we have always used stubs in Unit Tests, we tested against production public APIs for our functional and UI Testing. This always caused

Impression Tracking

A mind-blowing Impression Tracking engine for iOS

In one of my previous companies, it happened from time to time I had the opportunity to do some R&D of experimental ideas. What came out once, was, in my opinion, pretty neat. It never saw the light in production and I don't want this amount