Rob Whitaker accessibilty author and workshop host

Jeroen Leenarts: Hi, and welcome to another special edition of my podcast. I'm sitting here with Rob Whitaker. And he recently finished a workshop on accessibility. He wrote a book on inclusive mobile apps. And he has an interesting story on how we actually got into iOS app development. So we have a lot of stuff to dig into. So Rob, let's get started. How are you doing today? Rob Whitaker: I'm good. Thank you. How are you? Jeroen Leenarts: So first of all, on the workshop, on Twitter, we had some contact about that you recently finished it? What were the results? In your view? Was it was it successful? Were you happy with it? Rob Whitaker: Yeah, I think it went really well. We had a good number of people sign up for both of the workshops that I ran. And people seem to enjoy it and seem to learn a lot, which is the main thing. So yeah, I just hope, one day I can get to do it in person, which was the original aim for workshops, maybe one day, Jeroen Leenarts: so and the focus of the workshop was accessibility, right? Rob Whitaker: Yeah, so it covered iOS accessibility. The way I kind of wanted to do it is I built an app with just a ton of accessibility failures. And it was based on things that I've seen in other apps. So things have actually seen in the wild that cause accessibility problems. So things like missing alt text, things like animations, that just kind of happened too much or too often or don't respect people's preferences for things like produce animation. forms that are just too complicated and don't have any kind of clear instructions, filling them in things like that. So the ton of different things that I've seen in in real world apps, just to make it kind of realistic. And then during the the workshop, we kind of worked through there, and people identified where they thought there might be an area to improve the accessibility of the app, and made suggestions for what they could do to improve it from there. And in some cases, change the code as well to improve it was really nice to see. But yeah, that was kind of the idea. And kind of how it worked out. I think I was pretty pleased with how it went. But it definitely worked better, much better in person. Jeroen Leenarts: So that's a workshop on accessibility. And you also wrote a book called inclusive mobile apps, which I'll ask a little bit about, in short time. But it seems that accessibility and inclusivity is is sort of a thing for you. Is that correct? Rob Whitaker: Yeah. It's something that's always kind of been important to me. In terms of making apps, I think, I feel like, you know, if you if you want to make an app, why wouldn't you want everybody to be able to use it seems like a no brainer to me. But I guess the reason I kind of really got into it, I mean, there's a bit of an origin story. But the reason I kind of really got into sort of blogging and talking about mobile accessibility is just because I found this was something that I kind of knew a bit about, and people were starting to ask me questions about how they made their apps more accessible. So of all people asking me questions, they clearly want to know the answers. So I should try and help them with that. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay. It's always good to focus on things that, that you have an affinity or a passion for. And you also mentioned the origin story. So how did you get into tech? Because I think I know it's sort of like an interesting story that you have there. For instance, what was the first computer that you got your hands on? What age were you back then? Rob Whitaker: Okay, we go a long way back. So the first computer I ever had was an Atari ST. Which my parents bought, and I don't remember what it was or how old I was, I'm afraid but I was definitely I would have definitely been I think less than 10 at the time. And it sorry, st is not like a computer or kind of sort of desktop tower is not something that people tend to talk about that much. So maybe it was kind of an unusual machine. I don't know but people kind of think of as hobbies as for playing video games, but this was definitely intended as a desktop computer. But it was very good at kind of synthesizing music I remember at the time it was the Atari ST was the computer that you had if you made music with it, which I wasn't talented in at all but yeah, it I don't remember a whole lot about it other than it was really green. It wasn't like one of these sort of phosphorus green screen kind of things, but it was just the whole desktop was just green. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay, so that's, I have to look it up what it actually is and Atari ST. But did it get you into computers, or maybe computer programming, or did that happen at a later stage in your life. Rob Whitaker: So that happens a bit later. Not that much later. But the machine that we had after that was a PC. So this would have been late 90s, mid to late 90s, sometime. And this was the time when kind of PCs were becoming dominant, and everybody kind of had a PC. And that was it. There wasn't really any other option at that point. I guess if you're rich, maybe you had a Mac, but we weren't rich. So. But we on that machine, it had a version of Q basic. And it has a version of Q basic that had a compiler, which kind of I think was unusual because q basic was meant to be like an interpreted language. But this one had a compiler. So you can make dot exe files from it, which was kind of cool, because then I can share them with friends. But the reason I kind of started with it was I had been diagnosed, I guess, if that's the word with dyslexia. So I wasn't fantastic at school, I was okay, but not incredible. And I think my mum and read that people with dyslexia are often quite technical. So she kind of said to my dad, but you should teach him how to do programming. But dad did a small amount of programming with his work, but nothing much. It wasn't sort of the main part of the job. And so she kind of persuaded them to teach me a little bit, I think. And so it was just kind of making little toys and things with with the code with QBASIC. Really, nothing particularly remember, I think we made a game of snake and made some noise generators. But yeah, nothing much more than that. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah. But it's not something that you pursued in your education's if I'm right, because you worked in Apple retail at some point, right. Rob Whitaker: Yeah. So. So at that time, there was no mobile computing, obviously. And so competing was kind of business applications there was there wasn't even an internet at that point. And it was certainly in kind of the early days, the internet. So websites were just kind of static websites, mostly. So computing was just Yeah, business systems. And to me, that just seems so incredibly boring. Yeah, I couldn't imagine why anybody would choose to do that. I'm probably insulting a ton. Now, I apologize. But to say that there was nothing there that kind of interested me to want to carry on with doing programming. So yeah, I kind of didn't really follow it. But it was something I was always good at. I knew how to do it. I did do an A level in computing, which is, I don't know what the equivalent of that would be outside of the UK. Sorry, but it's like it's, I guess, college. It's before us do University anyway. So I didn't a level in computing. And I was pretty good at that. But I didn't see any enjoyment in doing it. Because I didn't see what what I would like you couldn't make anything that was fun or exciting, or that kind of made people happy. You could make things that made people depressed and bored when they went to work. And that's kind of it. Jeroen Leenarts: So you could say that in your formative years and in your in your educational career that well, those computers did, they didn't really look that exciting. So what was the path that you chose at that point? Rob Whitaker: So what I really enjoyed was politics. That's the I enjoy the kind of the boring minutiae of politics I enjoy how things happen why they happen rarely fascinates me. Like because so politics is all about compromise, right? So it's the what really fascinates me is you kind of get these that sometimes seem like weird decisions made by politicians, but they're weird because they, they kind of upset the least amount of people if that makes sense. So if you'd go slightly one way it's gonna upset that some people loads. And if you go slightly another way, it's going to upset some people, some other people loads. So you kind of go in this middle ground that upsets everybody, but just not quite as much. And I kind of enjoy how that sort of comes together, and the process of it and stuff like that. So I went to do politics at university. And I really enjoyed it. I, I kind of loved the three years that I did that. But the main thing that I learned about doing a degree in politics is that you can't change the world through politics. So after I finished university, I just didn't know what, what to do. I just felt a bit lost. Because that's kind of, that's what I wanted to do. That's what I enjoyed. And it just kind of taken all the passion out of it for me. So I moved back to my hometown, for my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife. And that week, I moved back. There was a, an advert for a job in an Apple store that was opening up in my town. It was an apple reseller, so not Apple themselves. I feel I know, Apple stuff, I like Apple stuff, I'll pay for that. And I'll maybe do that for a little while while I kind of have a think about what I want to do. And, yeah, they hired me as the assistant manager, and I kind of still didn't really know what to do. And then a couple years later, I got promoted to the manager, and I still didn't know what to do. So I kind of stayed there for 10 years, I did really enjoy it. If you like Apple stuff, then there's nothing better than talking to other people about how great Apple stuff is right? And I got to do that all day, every day, sometimes a lot of fun. So as a Jeroen Leenarts: manager, would you say that your education in the field of politics was helpful in being the manager of a group of people? Rob Whitaker: Maybe I would say maybe not. But I do regret. Definitely remember, one customer did want to tell me that I should become a politician because of how non committal I was answering certain questions, which I thought was a little bit unfair. But yeah, so I guess it's kind of similar, right to the politics that you can't, if you say, kind of one thing in one way, you're going to upset someone because it's not the answer they were expecting. So you kind of have to spin things in the way that kind of works best for them. Jeroen Leenarts: So you worked in retail for 10 years? And did you keep the program each alive in the meantime, or did it rekindle, like after a number of years, again, while you were working with basically selling apples products. Rob Whitaker: So if I hadn't really done any kind of programming or anything like that at all, since I kind of finished my a level and competing. So that would have been four or five years, probably maybe even a bit longer that I didn't do anything at all. And somebody at the shop was doing something with AppleScript. So this was before. So these days, if you go into an Apple store, the computers kind of reset themselves every few minutes. And if anyone changes anything on it, then it's just automatically reset, and it goes back to normal and so that people can't change the desktops to funny memes or whatever overs. Yeah, unfortunately, worse happens quite a lot. And yeah, that was I was actually a problem, a colleague of mine had written program using AppleScript. To do that for our machines. Because this was before the apple provided something to do that. And it was a bit of a problem, particularly sort of Saturday afternoons when the kids were around, you needed to be able to reset the machines. So he'd written an apple script that allowed you to pick one of our demo machines and to restart it remotely. So that would refresh. And I kind of saw what he'd done with that. And I kind of liked the look of Apple script. Because it was kind of almost sort of real language. Although I haven't looked at Apple script for years, but I think it would probably not quite like the syntax so much these days. But at that time, without sort of knowing a ton of programming. It kind of seemed interesting. So I kind of helped him a little bit with that. And then the iOS SDK came out, and not knowing much about how kind of making apps worked. I remember in the keynote, they said, all you need to make iphone apps is Xcode, I thought, well, I know Xcode, because I've used Xcode to make these Apple scripts. So clearly, that means I can write iPhone apps in Apple script. Jeroen Leenarts: It's a small job. But hey, yeah, Rob Whitaker: it turns out, you can't write iPhone apps with Apple script. But that's kind of kind of got me interested in it. That is we talked about earlier, like, when I kind of first started writing some programs in the 90s, there wasn't really anything that was particularly unless you did games, there wasn't really anything that was particularly interesting, you could do with computers. But with the iPhone, like, everything you could do on that was exciting. Because you had sensors, you had a touchscreen, you had some, you know, pretty decent quality screen, you could do graphics, and animation and stuff with. And so just the whole kind of idea of the possibilities of things that you could do with an iPhone were just exciting. Jeroen Leenarts: So an NGO, of course, had the advantage of pretty much everybody starting with iOS development was a beginner at that point in time, how was it getting into iOS development at that point in time without having formal education and relatively minimal experience on software development. Rob Whitaker: So there was a lot of, well, I guess, at the very beginning, there wasn't a kind of a ton of stuff. But I there was always kind of plenty of resources available to learn things, the ray Wonderlic site was always fantastic, I kind of started reading that, when it was just Ray himself writing it. But then as he kind of brought other people on, you know, there was just always a huge wealth of stuff on there, to learn whatever you want to know, their writing style was always really great as well. So I learned a lot of stuff in there. But it was still kind of several years from that point to kind of taking the jump into actually kind of doing it as a profession. And that was because I didn't I think the main reason for that is I didn't know anybody who did programming or, you know, iOS development or anything like that. So, in my mind, this was kind of magic that people were doing. And, you know, you guys, as in, you know, people who kind of make iOS apps, we're just these incredibly intelligent people who could do stuff that I could never imagine doing. And I just, I didn't think it was something that I could do as somebody who didn't have a CS degree, I thought you had to have a CS degree to do it. And I think I was thinking about this a little bit the other day, I can't remember what made me think of it. But when I was at school, I remember because I was always pretty good at kind of doing programming stuff. That I think the teachers were trying to encourage me part of my being dyslexic, or I suppose it would be dis calcula. But that wasn't really tested for at that point, is I just can't do maths, like flat starting last, like, as soon as there's numbers involved. That's it, I could do basic addition. But I can't do anything more than that. So my teachers would kind of say, because they knew I was not great at maths, and they knew I was good at computers and programming. And so they would kind of say, oh, you know, if you want to do programming, you need to be good at math. So I think they were trying to encourage me to, you know, study more at maths to get better at maths, but to me, because I knew I couldn't do that. It wasn't like, I just wasn't trying, it's just like, I can't do it flat out, there's like, it's just not an option. So because it wasn't an option. It's like, well, clearly, I can't do programming then because, you know, that just completely rules that out. So I think they were trying to be supportive and helpful. But actually, they were kind of doing the opposite in Jeroen Leenarts: your specific case, it was actually off putting. Yeah, so yeah, I've heard that before that, that people who have problems with problems, I shouldn't call it that, but who have some form of dyslexia also have dyscalculia I think it's called, and that it's very related to each other in the sense of that it's the same parts in your brain that are doing the same sort of processing. And yeah, if you're not wired that way, yeah, you're just not wired that way. And yeah, because it is interesting to hear you say that yeah, I was good at the programming thing. So that's the reasoning and the logic really. But then why was all this maths a requirement for a computer science education, and I've heard that that grievance with more people so that they think I don't use it in any of my regular day job activities, the whole the whole maths thing. And still, it was a requirement when I did my applications, and it was, was pretty hard to get through that. That's the minimal thing that you always hear with, with computer science level. Maths, really, Rob Whitaker: of course, if you're doing graphics or low level stuff, or something like that, it's incredibly important. But for your workaday programmers, it's not that often that you touch it. And when you do, like, that's literally what can be done before they are maths machines. So like, why do I need to know how to add up some numbers when I've literally got a machine in front of me to do it. Jeroen Leenarts: So you got started with the iOS SDK, just probably out of sheer interest and passion for the Apple brand, I reckon, and that it was something that piqued your interest, because hey, you could do Apple script, and I know Xcode and then you dove in and you run into a big wall, and then you start climbing against that wall to get on top of it and actually create your first iOS application, be the toy application or whatever, but just starting to learn. So how long did it take for you to actually create something that in hindsight, you look back at and think next? Oh, wow, did I create that. Rob Whitaker: So one thing that a lot of people will be familiar with, when people find out that you have that you can make iOS apps is they go, not so much anymore. But like, certainly a few years ago, they would go, I've got this fantastic idea for an iOS app, you should make that. And it's invariably a terrible idea that would cost millions to make kind of wouldn't have any real impact. And I, you know, because I didn't really know what I was doing. I had those same ideas that everybody else did, but just didn't quite know how to pull them off. But at the same time, had a bit of knowledge. I guess a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. But you saw I'd start these projects, thinking this is a fantastic idea. And then I get a little way down the road, and I go, Oh, this is like, no one person could ever build this. So yeah, there was several kind of things like that. I guess the the thing that I was kind of, I guess, if you're going to say like, what's the thing I can look back on and say I've achieved something. I have an app called Mars watch, which I kind of It's a super basic, super simple app. But I'm kind of really pleased with sort of what it does and the way it works. And I wish I could spend a bit more time on it. It's genuinely not worth my time. But that was a suggestion from a friend. He had an app on his iPhone that calculated the time on Mars. And this was when the Apple Watch was pretty new. And he said, Look, I've got this app that tells me the time on Mars. I really wish my watch could do that. So I made an app that took the time on Mars on an Apple Watch. But so that's kind of morphed more into an iPhone app now, because the developing the Apple Watch was not fun at all. It might be a bit better now. But certainly when it was new, it was a real effort to do anything on the Apple Watch. Yeah, Jeroen Leenarts: definitely initial watch kit releases. Yeah, you had to really jump through hoops and do strange things to actually get something on the screen. But nowadays, you can pretty much use Swift UI with some constraints. And you can really do dynamic layouts pretty much of course, there are some limitations, but it's not as constrained anymore. So that's it really improved a lot actually. Rob Whitaker: The I think the thing I enjoy most about that is that it literally does one thing right it tells you what the time is on Mars. And the app listing is very clear about the fact that it doesn't do anything other than tell you the time on Mars. And people still leave review saying I don't get the point of this app. All it does is tell you the time on Mars. And I reply to all of them ago. Yep. There is no point to Jeroen Leenarts: it. That's the whole point of the app. It's a singular utility. Um, so you've been in in retail for 10 years. So what are you currently doing them? Rob Whitaker: So I got to very close to the 10 year point in doing retail I kind of thought I've been just been doing this for long enough now I need to do something different. And I didn't know what different was. I didn't know what that would be and I kind of thought all I've I've been doing In this iOS programming for a little bit, maybe maybe I could make a career out of that. So I applied for a few places and Capital One, were kind of nice enough to give me a chance. And I'm still less. I've been there for about three and a half years now. And I genuinely don't think I could have done any better as a first job. And it's somewhere I could easily see myself spending plenty more time. Jeroen Leenarts: So for people who don't know, Capital One is a financial institute, right? Rob Whitaker: Yeah, so we are one of the biggest banks in the US. But in the UK, we are a credit card company. So we really just two credit cards. But yeah, it's kind of the the app I work on is just a client app for people to check their credit card account and pay their balance, see the pin on their card, and that kind of stuff. It's a pretty full featured app for a credit card servicing app. But yeah, and Capital One have just been incredible in the amount of support and freedom they've given me, you know, to essentially, at the time, when I started, I was a completely unknown quantity, I had no proper experience, no proper training or anything like that. They were, you know, they, it certainly my eyes took a chance on me. And they have supported me to do literally anything I wanted to do with them. And given me the flexibility to do things like focus on accessibility, and do the challenges that I kind of find exciting. So I'm very glad they kind of Jeroen Leenarts: gave ourselves at Capital One. Is it a team of people working on the iOS app? Or is it? Is it you and some other people working on other platforms? Rob Whitaker: Yeah, we have quite a few people. I couldn't tell you a number off the top of my head, I'm afraid but we so we have cross functional teams. So we have either two or three iOS engineers, and then either two or three Android engineers on a team with usually two quality engineers. And we have I think, six teams or the one. So there's quite a few of us that work. And Jeroen Leenarts: was it? Was it this setup from immediately when you got started? So you you onboard on a team with a more experienced group of software developers on board? Rob Whitaker: Yeah, we weren't quite as big when I started. I think there was four teams when I started. So we have grown a bit since then. But yeah, there was you Yeah, on a team with some more experienced engineers. And there's some really experienced engineers that are there. But we do do a lot with graduates as well. So there's always kind of new engineers coming in, which is, that's one of the things I really enjoy, as well as kind of teaching. People who've never done any iOS development, kind of, from the ground up, essentially, that's a lot of fun. But yeah, there's a guy called Matthew, who was on my team when I started. And he's a really fantastic engineer, very experienced, and he taught me a load of Jeroen Leenarts: stuff. So just to focus on your transition periods a little bit, because of course, you dabbled with iOS development in your spare time. And that's always limited what you can do, and what you can learn in in those hours that you have available, because those are not a lot. What was the biggest impact of becoming part of a group of software developers, which probably also contains a few people doing iOS development full time, like you are now. And so you transitioned from doing a few hours a week, a day on iOS development to doing it full time? So what was the biggest impact of that on you as a person and as a software developer? Rob Whitaker: as a, as a software developer, I can probably point to two things. One of them, I guess, is kind of an impact. And one of them, I guess, is more learning. So the first thing really would be that I can't just kind of do what I want him, which I guess this is this is why people kind of want to be an indie software developer, right? Because he you just do what you want. But if you're working on a big team with lots of other people, you can't just like, oh, I want to change that bit of code, because I think it'll work better this way. Or I want to implement this feature or I want start using this SDK or whatever. You have to make sure that it's not going to cause any unintended consequences. It's not going to mess things up for either customers or for other colleagues. Where that kind of when you're doing on your own Yeah, you just, you can do what you like pretty much. And if something goes wrong way, it's fine. I can just fix it, I just submit another build to the ad or Jeroen Leenarts: if you're on your own, there's no politics involved, right. And even in the opposite environment, there's also office politics. Not to say that that's a bad thing, because of course, you have to work together as a team. So that was one of the aspects that you had to get used to when writing software. And but you also mentioned something else that had a big impact on you. And that was the learning, I guess. Rob Whitaker: Yeah, the main learning for me was about testing, I think. Because it wasn't something I'd really done at all before. And I think, now kind of testing iOS code seems pretty natural, I think for for most places, but certainly a few years ago, I think testing iOS wasn't quite as ubiquitous as it maybe should have been. So there wasn't really like, if you will, kind of reading tutorials or whatever, there wasn't a ton of tutorials, it kind of said. And by the way, you should make sure you test this, or this is how you test your code or whatever. So that was kind of a big thing, I had to learn how to write testable code. But the reason I kind of picked out as my biggest learning is because now I really enjoy testing. I love kind of writing unit tests and UI tests, I love the way it makes you architect better code. And I kind of enjoy different things that you can do in tests, like, the one library that I've made is a UI test library. It's for accessibility again, but it kind of adds accessibility tests into UI tests. I kind of enjoy tweaking that, and kind of finding new things that I can do in UI tests. Jeroen Leenarts: So and would you say that in those three and a half years that you mentioned that you are working as a professional software developer? What was the biggest source of your growth as a software development? Was it just the fact of working together with fellow developers? Or was it more that through conversations with fellow developers you were? You became aware of new sources of information, book recommendations, stuff like that? Rob Whitaker: Yeah, definitely working with other people. I think that's a huge kind of thing. Because I've seen this with I remember seeing this with a candidate that I interviewed as well, once that they had kind of done a similar kind of thing. And, yeah, it's if you, when you're just learning on your own, there's only so much that you can learn before you kind of start picking up bad habits. And you kind of get stuck on certain things and learn, I guess, got weird workarounds, because there's nobody there to tell you the right way of doing something. Not that the necessarily ever is a right way of doing something when you're kind of programming something. But you know, there's different ways. There's ways that are generally kind of better. So, yeah, I think, kind of having other people there to give you a second opinion, to, you know, I love code reviews. Because, you know, there's always kind of someone else's opinion to kind of go, have you thought about doing it this way, and nine times out of 10. Like, their suggestion is way better than anything you could have thought. Jeroen Leenarts: So, um, one thing that we haven't really dug into is the fact that you wrote a book called inclusive mobile apps. What was it like for you to actually write a book on a specific topic? Rob Whitaker: So well, this kind of the whole reason this kind of started is because as we kind of talked about earlier, I'm dyslexic. And the main thing I really struggled with is reading. I can't, I can, I mean, I'm not illiterate, or anything I can read. It's just incredibly odd. And dyslexic, people aren't supposed to do things like write books. So that was kind of like felt like a challenge. So that to me, like, becoming a software developer as a full time career, that was a huge jump and a huge challenge to me. And so since then, I've kind of had the thought of that I should try and challenge myself more and kind of do things that I didn't think I could do. And so but kind of seems like that's a massive challenge for anyone, right? Especially for, like someone who's not really supposed to write a book. Jeroen Leenarts: So how did you how did you manage that? Because you have to get those words out on about paper or in at least in a written format. Rob Whitaker: Yeah, um, I, to be honest, I didn't kind of find it as difficult as I thought I would it was a lot of work. Like it was a ton of work. But I didn't find it super difficult. And I think the reason I didn't find it so difficult is because it was, it's a subject that I'm incredibly passionate about. And yeah, I'd like to think reasonably knowledgeable about as well, you know, something that I've kind of always known a decent amount about. But it gave me a good excuse to learn a lot more as well. And that's, that's what I really liked about blogging is that for me, whenever I write a blog, maybe this is quite selfish, but I don't write a blog post, because I want, I think people want to know about it so much, I write a blog post most of the time, because it's something that I want to learn or something that I have learned. And I want to just cement it in my mind. And so writing about it as a, I find the best way of doing that. And so that's kind of what it was like with the book, but just like 100 times more, Jeroen Leenarts: pretty much. Rob Whitaker: The thing with accessibility is it's in the enormous topic. And the iOS accessibility API's are huge as well. And they're not, as with a lot of Apple API is not particularly well documented. And so a lot of it came out because I wanted to, I basically wanted to document the apple accessibility API's. For me, so I kind of wanted to do that research anyway. So I kind of just wrote the research down as I was doing it. Jeroen Leenarts: And did you self publish the book? Or did you go through publisher? Rob Whitaker: It's published through a press. So I kind of sent the idea off to a few publishers not expecting to get anything back. But a press? Did I since found out that they were actually looking for a book on that subject. So it seems as though it was good timing. But yeah, they published it for me, I would have loved to have self published because one thing I really would like to be able to do is to kind of update it every now and then because there are additions. And yeah, as I mentioned, accessibility is such an enormous topic, there are things I've missed out. And I think there's probably some things that I've, I've kind of got the terminology a little bit wrong, or have just not been quite as careful with my language, as I maybe, perhaps would have liked to have been. And I guess if you're going to write a book, there's always going to be things that you can pick out one for yourself, isn't it the don't like about it, I would love to be able to kind of update it. And kind of send updates out for free for for the people who've bought it. But unfortunately, with the publisher, that's not really an option. If I'd self published it, then I absolutely could. But I just don't have the profile to self publish, unfortunately. But maybe if I ever do another one, then I will self publish. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay. And as you already mentioned, you wrote about the topic of accessibility, because inclusive mobile apps is mostly about the accessibility features in iOS, I reckon. Rob Whitaker: It does cover Android as well. So yeah, I cover kind of the features and the accessibility API's on Android. Unfortunately, as with iOS, I couldn't cover everything, but I think it definitely covers Jeroen Leenarts: a lot of it. Okay. Now we'll make sure to put a link to your book in the in the show notes so that people can actually find the book. And you also mentioned that you write a blog, and I'll make sure to put a link to that as well. And yeah, you don't have a workshop running at the moment, right? You just finished your first public batch of workshops, I could say, but do you plan on doing future workshops? Again, Rob Whitaker: I would love to, as I mentioned earlier on, I would love to run this workshop in person. It was originally intended to be run in person. But unfortunately that for obvious reasons never happened, but maybe one day it will. So we'll kind of see if that happens. I do from time to time as companies asked me to do a bit of trading I'll kind of do an hour or two for them on kind of whatever they want to know a little bit about but nothing public coming up. For the foreseeable future. Jeroen Leenarts: One thing you could look into is a lot of conferences internationally, they have these these tutorial days so that you have like half day long sessions. And and I found that if you want to get your feet into doing training, providing workshops and stuff like that, that signing up for those things, you actually get a somewhat of a payout at the end. But also they take care of all the plane tickets and all that stuff because they're just very happy that you You want to present and teach at their events. But that's also for people out there who are looking into sharing knowledge, besides blogging or other online formats, just go to conferences, and not only go to them, but also try and get on the stage by submitting cough paper, on conference. And even for tutorials and trainings, there are options available, actually. So, Rob, is there anything that that we forgot, or something that we still need to mention? Before we close out? Rob Whitaker: There was one other thing that when you kind of asked me about things that were different with kind of joining Capital One and kind of becoming an iOS engineer full time, one of the biggest changes for me is kind of the lifestyle. So I mean, I'm, I'm not going to be the only person listening to this who's worked in retail, but the difference in kind of the job I do now, I kind of think of as it's like being treated like an adult, you don't really get that in retail. In retail, you kind of it's always assumes that you're doing something bad or wrong. And that you should be doing better or harder. Whereas now it's kind of, it's assumed that you're doing your best. And you're if something bad goes wrong, if something doesn't go as you planned, then it's kind of, okay, what can we learn? How do we do better next time, whereas in retail, it's, well, you've messed something up. So you've got to fix him. And it's your fault. So yeah, I really appreciate that. And I think things like that, things like being trusted to make the right decision. You're being able to kind of decide what you're working on, and how you work best. And that kind of stuff. I think is can be something that's sometimes taken for granted. It's not something I had when I worked in retail, and it's not something that most people have, I think the one that said, I think we're lucky as software developers, there is some some privileges that you have, just because you have such an abstract Jeroen Leenarts: topic that you're working on that those around you, most of them, they don't really understand what you're doing unless they're a software developer as well. And fortunately, most of developers, they utilize this privilege in a way that it benefits their own style of working, and it doesn't detract from the company, or the people around them that are waiting for the results of of your labor as a software developer. So that's actually very good to know that most of the developers are actually in it just for the enjoyment, and that most people are just doing their job and trying to do the best they can while doing it. So Rob, thank you very much for your time. And I'll make sure to link up everything from the show notes so that people can find you online. Because what's the best way for people to stay up to date with the things that you're planning and the things that you are putting online? Rob Whitaker: Thank you very much. It was great talking to you. I've had fun on Twitter as Rob R WAP. That's probably the best place to kind of find out if I'm doing anything exciting. Next, but I'm not planning anything for a little while. But maybe in future. We'll see. People should give that follow on Twitter, right? Yeah, I did often kind of post little tidbits of accessibility kind of information and tips and things like that. So that can be useful. I have a another account, mobile CLI mobile, a one one wife, and spelt. And that's kind of my mobile accessibility account. So if you particularly want to know more about mobile accessibility, that's the place to go. And then there's mobile ally.com. Again, a one one wide, which is where I blog about mobile accessibility. Not as often as I'd like. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay, Rob, thanks for your time and talk to you so Rob Whitaker: lucky. Jeroen Leenarts: Is that the whole first Lego set behind you? Rob Whitaker: It is yes. Jeroen Leenarts: Let's not go into that because then we need another hour at least