At Artsy, sharing knowledge is heavily encouraged and so we write our code in the open, document using blog posts, and speak about our experiences. Many have bumped into us at various places around the world. And so I often get the question: “How did you get started? I’m interested in speaking too”.

In the name of sharing experiences with others, I can’t encourage this enough. Unfortunately though, public speaking is still considered man’s biggest fear.

I’d like to share with you the benefits of public speaking, tips on how to get started, and how to give great presentations.

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I have been writing code for roughly a decade. A large chunk of that time has been sitting waiting for my project to compile. It’s a nice excuse to practice sword fighting in the office, but really, deep down. It’s frustrating. It’s so easy to become nerd-sniped when you wait for a long time.

As we integrate Swift into our projects, I’ve been seeing our compile times increase. So, I took some time to look at ways to improve this. The best option, so far, has been dynamic code injection via Injection Plugin for Xcode. In a gist: This means that we don’t recompile and re-launch, instead we inject new bits of code into a running application. This reduced the compile cycle on Eigen from 7 seconds to 1 second.

I took some time over the weekend to try and put together a video showing how I used code injection on a trivial app to create a view controller in code. It covers the technique I’ve started using in Eigen and talks a little bit about how the pieces come together.

Jump to YouTube for the video, or click more for a smaller inline preview.

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I juggle a bunch of projects, both in Artsy and in the Open Source community. If you don’t work with me directly, you’d be mistaken for believing that I was an organized person. I’m pretty far from that, and don’t really plan on changing that.

However, I work with other people and very strongly believe that programming is mostly a social problem once you’re good enough at writing code. It’d be hypocritical of me to not improve the people process side, so I try to automate processes that makes me a better team-mate.

I’m going to cover four things I’ve worked on lately to improve this: Danger, GitHub-Clippers and improving how I write commits and prefixing my name on branches.

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We are slowly trying to do high-level code-review views for all of our iOS apps. So far, we’ve covered Eidolon and Emergence and now Energy. This is the second part of the Energy code review. The first part covers the the critical codepaths that go from the App’s launch to sending an email, which is the main use-case for the app. This video covers how Folio does sync between the Artsy API and the app.

Sync is a complex problem. This video covers our old techniques, how we changed them, the underlying abstractions we use now and how we can test each component individually. It’s an hour long, and it’s a little computer-sciencey. So I think people who have shipped some small apps would get a lot out of it.

Jump to YouTube for the video, or click more for a smaller inline preview.

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We are slowly trying to do high-level code-review views for all of our iOS apps. So far, we’ve covered Eidolon and Emergence. Folio is an app that’s shipped to the App Store in early 2012, it’s used by our Partners to showcase their works offline, at fairs and on the go. If you want the full spiel, check out this microsite.

This video talks through a lot of the critical codepaths that go from the App’s launch to sending an email, which is the main use-case for the app. We have another video coming up which exclusively covers how Folio does sync between the Artsy API and the app.

Jump to YouTube for the video, or click more for a smaller inline preview.

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When I was at the beginning of my career, my first developer job application was to a design agency who were doing Mac development too. It was pretty nerve-wracking to apply for my first programming job, and I came into the interview with no idea what to expect. I had just graduated from university and was at the first few steps of my career, I’d call this being a junior. It was a time period where I would need mentoring, and supervision in order to grow. A good explanation is in this StackOverflow.

Now that I’m both further on in my career, and involved with so many juniors in NYC, I’m meeting with a lot of people who are in the same position I was then and I get a lot of questions asking what they can do to prepare. This post attempts at being a comprehensive collection of recommendations. It is subjective, of course, and strongly biased towards my experiences.

Before I jump through to the article, there’s one thing that should be above the fold. Chill out. You might not get it right on the first try, I’ve applied for jobs and received a “no thanks.” Yet eventually I became the head of mobile at Artsy. Everyone finds their place in time.

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Let’s take a look at the day in the life of an open source citizen: me. On our app, I was given an issue that would allow users to refine what kinds of sale artworks they were looking at, and it included this awesome slider control so they could set min/max price ranges.

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While the Artsy engineering team includes many disciplines, tech stacks, and personalities, we all share a few things in common: a respect for each other, an appreciation of art-meets-science, and a celebration of learning. These are actually traits shared with our entire company, even non-engineers. So last Summer when Orta and I had some down time, it occurred to us how we could do something super-productive that was congruent with our values: we could teach the company Swift.

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Eidolon is the third app from Artsy’s mobile team, and it was the first to be developed totally in the open. It’s often used as a reference for what an app written in Swift, or written using FRP, should look like. Given how interested the community seems to be around the app, it’s about time we did a walkthrough of the code.

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The Artsy engineering team has been moving towards Open Source by Default. In 2015 the Mobile team managed to get there. Since then, we’ve been writing up our process on this blog and offering advice to anyone would would ask for it.

I’ve been in talks with lots of companies you’ve heard of, on the how and the why of this. Recently Ello got in touch, and we tried to capture the process. They came out with a great post that I’d strongly recommend reading. I’d like to try and come from the other side, and address what are the questions people ask. Consider this a FAQ for how the mobile team does/got to OSS by default.

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