Pedro Carrasco, organizer of SwiftAveiro, iOS developer on Todoist

Jeroen Leenarts: One final question. How do i pronounce your last name correctly? Pedro Carrasco: I'm not going to tell you that. No. I mean, if you're a Portuguese, it would say be a little harsh. If you're English, I people usually say Pedro Carrasco dried and whatever comes out, I'll accept it. Jeroen Leenarts: I will totally mangle it. But that's fine. Pedro Carrasco: Give me like the Dutch just way you can say my name. Jeroen Leenarts: Definitely Pedro Carrasco. Pedro Carrasco: It's pretty similar to Portuguese, so I'll probably go with that. Jeroen Leenarts: So Hi, and welcome to another special edition of my podcast. I'm sitting here with Pedro Carrasco. He is a software developer focused on iOS since February 2017. He studied at some place I'm not even able to pronounce so ask him to say that out loud a little bit later. He has a bachelor's degree in software engineering. He is a avid open source enthusiast and contributor. And he helps by sharing currently works at Todoist app at newest. He also works at cocoa hub. That's an app he created himself. And he also runs the cocoa has portal. So hi, federal welcome. Pedro Carrasco: Hi, thank you for having me. I'm super excited to be here. Jeroen Leenarts: So the place that you studied, can you please tell us what's it called? Pedro Carrasco: So if you go into the shorter form, you can say is app I'm in pronouncing Portuguese? It's his app. If we go with the whole words like EC two, two superiorities JD report, which means like it's Institute, a superior Institute. So University for engineering basically, in Portal. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay, so you have a bachelor's degree at a university in Porto. And it's a good degree to have exactly, yeah, you currently work at duelist on Todoist. It trips me up every time I have to say, Pedro Carrasco: I'm going to introduce you a new word. It's actually I work at duelist on both to do list and twist. So the whole company has all thing we founding products with. So just Miss Miss people up people minds, I guess. Jeroen Leenarts: So how long did it take for you to actually come to grips with this? Pedro Carrasco: It was fairly quick, quick, because I've been using to do list. The product, not the company. For for a whole for a bunch of years, I guess I cannot really precise was when I started using it's like a whole to do. I mean, it's not obvious from the name to do management app. So I mean, I knew the product for a while. And then I started hearing about the company and are good at was the whole remote thing that they were like leading the whole remote industry. And then I mean, it was, I guess, is it enough for me? Because well, I got both terms introduced in separate time. So it was easier to grasp. I guess, Jeroen Leenarts: if I'm correct, you graduated in 2017. And so you've been doing iOS software development professionally for three years. But now, have you been working at the same company all the time? Or did you start somewhere else, Pedro Carrasco: it's actually my fourth company. Now, I was lucky enough to have a internship on iOS went just when I was almost finishing university. So just you've gone tax here in Portugal, I'm not sure if it's same for the rest of the world. And most universities, especially in engineering, when you're like last year of your bachelor, you have like last semester semester, I'm going to merge this word in the last off of the year, you have the opportunity to go to a company work on a project and then write a little teasers or document about it. So I was lucky enough that my internship was actually on on iOS and I was back then I was still using Objective C because well, the company was still using Objective C even though swift already came out. But it was still in the early days. So yeah, you know, Swift breath for lot to or follow. People didn't like it at all. So yeah, I was lucky enough to start a company, I did my internship. And then I moved on to another company called this applications in which I stayed for around a year. And it was basically a software house. So I was able to like start projects from scratch define architectures on a lot about architectural. I learned a lot about architectures. But then I decided to move to Farfetch, which was more more product company. So I was I would be able to set off like build a whole bunch of apps and not really focus a lot on a single one for maintenance and improving stuff for if it was a product to project product company. So I would instead be working on just a single product and we'll keep iterating on top of it, improving it. fixing bugs improving architecture, and the whole thing seemed far fetched for around two years if I'm not wrong. But then in March of this year, I decided to go full remote on John Lewis. The funny thing is, is that at the same time in March, every single one in the world decided to go freely mode so yeah, I'm just not that special anymore because well if everyone fold, Jeroen Leenarts: so Farfetch instead of company they She then worked in their office. Yeah. And where are they situated? Pedro Carrasco: Ah, they are poro more specifically in lesser W. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay, yeah. So you, you, you, you studied in Porto, you live in Porto. And at some point, you decided to stay in Porto but execute your job remotely? Exactly. And then you ended up at? To do is no do just go get. And so you live in important with your girlfriends? Yeah, you know her for a long time Pedro Carrasco: I actually met her are in university. And we've been dating me not dating, we've been boyfriend and girlfriend since then. And this year, on March also, I mean much was a whole month of changes. We also decided to buy an apartment and we are now living here. He which is also in Portal, but more specifically, if you want to go in details, it's in Maya. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay, so it's good to know if you know the area around there. Um, so as an iOS software developer, you now work at duelist? Oh, yes. Pedro Carrasco: No, both to do this and twist. Oh, boy. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay, well, I'll just leave it up to you. So you work at a company and you do work at a product? And so what is your day to day involve? Are you focused on coding? Or like getting specs for features? Or what do you do in your day job. Pedro Carrasco: Most of my day revolves around both coding and reviewing others code like pull requests, reviews. And so and that's pretty much what all my day revolves on. In terms of meetings and stuff that usually engineers don't like to do is like, like I said, early, the company is very much focused on remote and a synchronous work. So we completely avoid meetings at all costs. So we tend to write a lot right documentation to share things for my writing with each other. So maybe there's not much blockers to my whole coding sessions, I'm allowed to, like have deep sessions of the work sessions. And that's great. Once per per month, because our Sprint's are like one month long, I also have like, it depends on what I'm going to do. But I could also have like documentation and preparing for a new feature or an internal work that we aim to do, like have to document some things, see to gain, see what's going to improve whatnot, maybe some little research, but most of my day is tense is pretty much based around coding. Jeroen Leenarts: And the team that you're working, how many engineers Pedro Carrasco: think we are nine iOS engineer Apple engineers, this guy's because we also have lots of eyes on the whole thing. So it's not really iOS engineers, but the whole apple suit. See, I think we are around nine or eight, or maybe 10. We are around a number. Yeah. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay. And so you mostly work on code, I guess. Yeah. Swift? Yeah. And is there still a lot of Objective C in their codebase. Or Pedro Carrasco: it's actually one thing we are actually we are actively tracking because when I joined one of my first tasks where law was like deleting some objective C that we add, and by the time we are like at 99 dot x percent of Swift already, so by now we are at 99 dot, let's say 5%. And enable a new person who just joined the company which is operator which is also sudo. Aveda organizer like me, is now cleaning up the rest so we will be 100% Swift in probably one two weeks, I guess. Jeroen Leenarts: That's really nice. Also using Swift UI a lot already. Pedro Carrasco: Not yet. We are aiming to but we are still looking for like swift UI change the paradigm in a lot of ways terms of architecture and how you deal with data and stuff. As you're we are first doing some spikes and research on how we can like to find your data we are aiming to use in the future. So we don't like right when right swift UI now then we right from your dashboard trying to figure out the best way we are the way we are looking to write code in the future. And once we finish that spike in research, we will start using like swift UI for probably just simple views at the start likes empty screens, settings, manuals and stuff like that. And then a swift UI evolves, we can probably start looking into more and more complex screens. Same applies to combine. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay, yeah, combine this is a very interesting thing that we're looking at my job, too, as well. Because we're probably going to start working in earnest on everything there in one or two weeks as well. So it's going to be it's going to be an interesting few months, I think. So you mentioned that you work fully remotely and and the way that you described it, you work remotely. It kind of sounds like the base camp kind of way that you work remotely. Are there any specific platforms or tools that you that you use to To facilitate is remote working, or is it completely bespoke? Something that was developed in house? Pedro Carrasco: I think you hit the nail with your last question because twist is like Slack plus email, but focus on being a synchronous and being remote. So we use our own communication tool for that. And we also used to do is for like, it's a task management. And funnily enough, we also added boards, oh, in late summer. So that also makes like whole sense of the whole engineering thing. Because we board we can now it's pretty much like Trello, where you can like, go from in progress to back up. backlogs in progress to done in test and whatsoever. We also use like paper, sometimes for documents, but we also have our own. We call the 10 book, it's like a whole documentation for being hosted by I think it's also by GitHub Pages. If it's not, I'm completely wrong. And it's like, like something is really markdown from our GitHub, and we generate the whole documentation based on that. Jeroen Leenarts: So basically, as a company, and as a team, you're really dogfooding the stuff that you that you write, so you're using your own tools to actually develop your tools. Pedro Carrasco: If you're using your own product, you kind of start get updated on how things should work if you're working well or not. And that's was actually one of the motives I decided to leave Farfetch because Farfetch was like a luxury Mark market for for products. And I mean, I didn't buy 1000 euros bags or stuff like that. So I was like, Yeah, I don't really feel a connection. So I didn't use it on my daily basis. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay. In passing, you mentioned Swift, a pharaoh. Can you tell us a little bit about what it actually is and what it is about and because I don't think most people on my podcast actually have heard about Swift or Pharaoh a lot. Pedro Carrasco: That's sad. So I'll try to explain. So Swift is a conference for is a bit of a lot of conference on our on our area likes and Spain. So we thought builders at Def calm and we have a whole bunch now. So stuff is another conference based on workshop format. So it's similar to I think it's swift tops and swift Iceland that recently launched, I think, one or two years ago. So yeah, it's basically a conference. workshop based. It's near to see so it's in the town of Aveda in Portugal. Jeroen Leenarts: How many editions have there been from Swift? Pedro Carrasco: Gonna stop asking me numbers, but I think it's five. Jeroen Leenarts: And and you've been involved with all of them? Or no, Pedro Carrasco: I started working on the first edition if I'm not wrong, because that was also when I worked with this ROM Pereda. The one I said, just try and do is he actually was actually on the come in my second company, too. So in place applications, it was only for a while because he was a consultant. So he was just like, he was working remotely, I would didn't even see him in the office, but I managed to help him in a project there. So that's when I met him. We shared some ideas, and he decided to invite me to sit up there. So he is the one responsible for giving me the opportunity. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay, so and what was it like for you to be part of organizing a conference? Pedro Carrasco: Oh, it was a whole bunch of things. It was stressful. It was great. It was super, super, like, you try to be as organized as possible. But then out of nothing, everything fails. And like the whole TV starts to fail. The room that we had scheduled for the initial like the whole presentation of the conference, MC stuff suddenly gotten booked. So yeah, it's, it was incredible. I really enjoyed I met a lot of people, I learned a lot of things, but it was also so stressful. But we are glad he went okay. And that's all that matters in the end. So when was the last edition? last edition was last year. This year. We didn't because because of COVID. last edition was 12. We are in 2020. So it was on June 2019. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah, it was in the same boat as Swift or fair because start of the year at Koko Head. So now we were planning on organizing another edition of do iOS in Amsterdam. But then the whole COVID thing happened in the Netherlands as well of course, and we decided that it was in our own interest really to skip it because it was just too new, too much. Too uncertain, really. So hopefully next year in 2021, which also gives us a nice segue to the next topic because I've heard you are also involved with cocoa has Porto, but coke exporter has been put in a sort of like sleep pattern due to COVID as well. But can you tell a little bit about coke has Porter Pedro Carrasco: so Just like superhero, I was not one star Coco at sporto, it was actually another guy. But like you're in the first edition, and then I was already recognized with diversity was like a I could probably try to do also to help him organizing it in Portal. So that so everything Sarah, I joined the team. And another, I mean, in the second edition, we're, we're alright, I think we're free or for organizing it. And then we try to do the whole monthly thing that Coco ads usually do. It didn't work out very well, because it was very hard to find local speakers. So we were usually like, it was really hard to find people and to convince people to come. And that will usually lead to a lot of stress prior to the event, because we'd like a, we already announced it, we have to find someone. So that was not really ideal. So we decided to try a two month period. But then, by late of like the legislations have not really fault any better. And we are instead just like, once we find speakers, or once a company approaches us we do do an event. Jeroen Leenarts: And you also have a side project, I think called Coco hip Pedro Carrasco: yet, and you know that name, ah, that I think about I think the whole this, this episode is going to be the whole bot names, because we have to do is to do is twist, we have Coco, Coco up. I I think we are on something here. Jeroen Leenarts: This is going to be an elaborate set of show notes, I think. So let's Coco hub. Oh, what is it? It's an app. I know. But why did you start this project? Pedro Carrasco: Oh, that's a brilliant question. I'm afraid I will not give the best answer possible for this. But before Kokoa, I was actually working on a Pokemon trading card application because as a kid, I was like a huge Pokemon Trading Card. fan and I still have a lot of cards. So I was like, I was doing like, you know what every developer does. I mean, he starts he opens up the App Store and starts researching for random stuff that he tries to find. So I was like, hey, is there any real application for trading card games? Because back in the day, that would be awesome. So I did some research, I noticed that that the applications that were existed, were not that good, at least not something that I would use. So I was like, Yeah, I should really build one. So I tried to build one. Like, of the development cycle, The Pokemon Company released an official app for it, which was awesome. And I was like, No, no way to just like kill my side project out of nowhere. So then I was like, I need something to do, I'm complete. I don't know what to do with my free time I did something. So I mean, I started researching, I started thinking about it. And I was like, hey, you know, it'd be awesome an application that gather like speakers and events and conferences, talks and stuff like that. And that was like the core foundation of kocowa. He then turned into something completely different, because I was like a maintaining a whole database of conference talks, and speakers and talks associated to them. And the whole thing was going to be like, it was going to be really hard to maintain just myself. So I was like, Yeah, I'm just going to reshape the whole thing. So then you then end with Coca Cola being like more focus on news, events and articles instead. Jeroen Leenarts: So the back ends of coke. What is it actually, Pedro Carrasco: the back end is actually open sourced on GitHub. And through, I wrote it with paper. So it's full Swift. That's, that's it. I mean, it's yours. It is for databases, Postgres. I think terms of technical things, the content is also open source. So you can actually add news events or articles, I mean, it, it is curated, so you just cannot add it. And it's done. You have to go through the process and being accepted. But that repositories, actually not the database that's like, mirroring the real database, because a real database is hosted on Heroku. So it's like using the whole suite vapor thing. So it's not really using GitHub Pages, instead of just like, the whole kind of thing is just a mirror so people can contribute without having the hassle of using posts and reads and stuff through a database. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay. And have you do you have any numbers on how many people are using cocoa hub at the moment? Pedro Carrasco: Ah, at the moment, I think around 100 People are using it daily. It used to be higher, but I mean, that's I think that's all things go. I mean, you launch a product, it's our tie, then it starts to decrease or increase depending on the popularity. So for it's good, I think it's our target to engineer so I didn't expect it to be the most popular app on the App Store. So it's around 100 daily interest terms of installations, I think it was already like, Okay, again, I cannot be showing the numbers I will need to double check. But I think three or 4000 people already installed the app, not that they are using it daily, because otherwise it would be 4000 daily users. And I think that's, that's that's it. Jeroen Leenarts: So do you blog or any other online outlets that you that you use, or Pedro Carrasco: I try to blog, I managed to do like when I started to consistent base, like one per mouth or like something similar. But I mean, I think it just happened, what happens to all of us, we just start something we are very excited about, we keep doing it for a while. But when you start to run out of ideas, you start to be more criticized, not only more criticized, but to try to start to criticize ourselves a little more and raise the parameters, raise the standards, so you tend to block yourself because like a marriage is not good enough. And maybe this topic, I think it would be good, but now, I really don't think anyone would want to read that. So yeah, just block yourself to eternity, and then you stop writing. So that's pretty much my life story and blogging. I wish and I want to use, especially for Cocoa. I mean, there are some things that for example, new feature that I think that I should write a blog to explain eight C's not can change anything, it's just more focused words. These are like showcasing the roadmap via blog posts. But yeah, I mean, you either write the app or you write blogs for it. So it's for now, I'm still just writing the app and not writing blogs. Jeroen Leenarts: So you've been working professionally for three years, you have your side project with cocoa hub. And once COVID is over, you probably will have a side project with conferences in Koko heads again. So how do you how do you manage your time? Is your work on to do is is that like really set between certain hours? Or is it more open to how you feel your agenda? Pedro Carrasco: Or I think it was my it was my girlfriend answering this, the answer will be completely different. She will say I completely suck at managing my time. If since I'm the one answering it, I will say that there's not really a schedule for either cocoa or cocoa ads. It's just natural, I guess the saying I tried to spend time with my my loved one. But sometimes, you know, you're you're like working on something and you're like, one minute away for to get to like stop it and go watch some Netflix or something. But then you find a bug. And then instead of one minute, you have one hour, two hours, three hours, she's not sleeping four hours, five hours, oh, I finally fix it. Let's What? No, she's sleeping. So say I can, I'm really bad at when I'm doing something. If I find something that's blocking me, I just cannot stop. If I stop, I'll go, I can stop it. I'll probably go watch some Netflix and sleep. But I will watch Netflix thinking about it. I'll sleep thinking about it and will wake up thinking about it. So I just rather finish it and never think about it again. Jeroen Leenarts: Yeah, that I think that's a challenge for most software developers really to just being able to put work down and continue at a later point in time. Pedro Carrasco: And, and, and again, there are exceptions, but I'm pretty good doing that for like professional work, for example, do is firefighter I'm pretty, pretty good at being able to turn off. But for side projects, I mean, it's your side projects, probably something you love something you really want to shine. And time is a constraint because you have a day job. So you just don't have all the time of the world that you want. So yeah, that's that's definitely the odd spot for me finding time constraints for things that I love, for example, even even sorry, even if I'm not talking about surprise, for example, let's say I'm playing some game. If I'm really loving the game, I really get deep into it. And I just pretty much forget time. And then my girlfriend is saying a What are you going to watch the Netflix show? And I'm like, Oh, I forgot that. So see, I think I mean, so things are hard, really hard to manage. Jeroen Leenarts: Okay. And so, we talked about a number of things already. We talked about your work on Todoist on goco, hub Schrift afero, and cocoa hats portal. When you look at your, the gaining knowledge, so to speak, so just be getting better as a software engineer. What are the ways that you that you get knowledge? Are there any books or resources that you like to use? Or do you have any recommendations on that? Pedro Carrasco: That's a great question. So in terms of what I do, and doing I think that's a great source of learning stuff. I mean, so projects are great for learning API's that you're probably not able to support because you're still supporting a low lower deployment target that will allow you to use for example swift UI are combined so products are great for that. Not that I'm using Swift UI yet but I'm using combined on cocoa. Cocoa add is also great for us with a very because well you were just meeting your people communicating have them learn things from them getting to learn your experiences, feedback from companies, I mean, that's a whole bunch of things that you can learn out of events such that, like is once in terms of books and articles and things like that meant I'm pretty much forced to read everything that comes out in every week because I'm curating the whole articles for Cocoa ipsum. Every week, on Friday, brother just go through all the links, read everything, see if it's good enough, it's not good enough. If it's, it's if it's not good enough, but I think that it has potential I sometimes send a tweet or an email to the writer to explain this was almost good enough. If you improve, these are days, you'll probably be able to get featured on next one. Sam pretty much forced to learn in a way. Not that not that bad, by any means. But before that, I will I would like Israel on the ledge was a great source back when I was starting. Objective CIO books are pretty good, too. I'm also really enjoying a new point free series on the whole architecture for swift UI is pretty much based on Redux. And it's really awesome, the way they built the whole framework. And the fact that they have videos is great, because if you need to change something that you don't like about the framework, you have the videos to explain why they did that, and how can you change. So I think that's like the perfect way of building a framework Xavius something that is related to architecture, because if you're importing that you are heavily dependent on that you cannot really like just change it off off Southern. So having veto support is a great idea and I'm really loving the whole concept. And I think that's pretty much it. I mean, you also have the daily articles from Johnson dowel from Donnie walls from Antoine. I'm going to merge his name Antoine League. Yeah, I'm going to have the top two in the middle. Jeroen Leenarts: And that you would say Antoine formulae but okay, when it's in English, he likes to call himself Antoine formerly. But that's also due to how he has named his blog swiftly. And explains, yeah, so yeah, Pedro Carrasco: you also have like people like it actually forgetting his name. But his Twitter handle is misete. Like he writes a lot about Swift UI MSI for their ICO. zenitel is starting to write a lot more and more these days. I mean, there's a whole bunch of people should follow up, not me, definitely. Because I don't I don't blog again, I just tried to I stopped it in the middle of the process. But there's a whole bunch of people in our community that do like hold off particles every single week. And I mean, they deserve all the love they can get. Okay, I'm sorry, I forgot someone. Jeroen Leenarts: There's so many out there because I noticed that as well for my regular episodes of my podcast that I'm constantly adding new sources, and currently my RSS reader for the that that that that contains the buckets that are used as my inbox for my episodes, it's I think I'm at like 140 distinct sources already. And this includes newsletters and and then and blogs, and sometimes even podcasts. But it adds up. But Pedro Carrasco: I'm trying to find now going on. Jeroen Leenarts: And I have to do some filtering on that. But I'm getting better at it as well. Pedro Carrasco: Yeah, at one point. I was I mean, I also use RSS for both news and articles, just to kind of for to help me get everything I need. At one point, he aired, like both news and articles in the same page. So I in the no side split, because I mean, there was so many people writing articles that I was completely like, the whole page is completely, like, filled with articles. And I was just sometimes missing the news. So and I have two different RSS pages, like one only for news and one that I only checked on Friday, because that's the day for articles. Jeroen Leenarts: What was it like getting started in software development? Was it was it hard? Or was it an enjoyable experience? Or were there any challenges that you face that you think, Well, maybe if I can provide this bit of information to the people that are coming behind me that they get some benefit from that. Pedro Carrasco: In 100%, my experience was been very enjoyable. I was very fortunate that I was able to met meet great people along the way. I mean, the whole every single team I worked for were at great people in there. We had funny people you had intelligent people, we had people with a lot experience with not so much experience, but it was a great environment. So in that regard, I cannot really like sharing advice because well, my experience everything has been great. So I've been like in a privileged position for that. In terms of learning of course i My birria sometimes found careers sometimes it my, my my wall with my head. I mean that's how our daily driver I think it's so it's trying to get along with it and trying to get past it because I mean you It's impossible to know every single thing. I always Google stuff. I mean, even some basic stuff I was going away, because I'm not sure. And I want to be sure. But I think the the principle that you got to learn with time is not that you have to learn every single API, every single thing that there is out, because hey, they keep changing it every year. So there's no point in in learning it every single year. thing is that you have to grow as a person as an engineer to be able to identify which of the tools you should be using. So for example, one could say that for Cocoa hub, I'm using Swift everywhere and a swift everywhere because it is the best option. Now it was because I wanted to learn vapor. And so I use back end for vapor, for example, this is still an announced but before going through the Mac OS app, planning to build a website for first, that also sorts of content instead of being just a landing page for for like owning the app. So I would like to allow people who are still learning swift with Windows and Android phones to still like, get the latest stuff and have some place to go. So I'm planning to do a website first. So one could argue you're using Swift everywhere, you could be using like vapor again, because there's leaf and you could be a front end with it. Or you could use for example, Johnson Dell website. I mean, there are many options now. But I'm leaning towards react, because hey, I want to learn how to web automate, because well, I how I can do is just HTML and CSS, and even then, I'm just terrible at it. So I really want to go deeper into it. So yeah, just learn the set of tools that makes your job better. And that's what's the issue, the problems that are facing bear. I think that's the biggest advice I can give. Don't, don't don't like stick to a thing because it's sunscald. Just learn, learn what he does, what what it's fits for, and then use it if it's appropriate. Jeroen Leenarts: I think that wraps it up, Pedro. What I noticed is, you already did a lot of stuff and organize conferences, organized Co Co heads, write your own side project, work at several companies, and learning everyday. So thanks for your time and talk to you later. Pedro Carrasco: Thanks for the kind words and thanks for inviting me. This was awesome. We're looking forward for future episodes.