Coding buddies

When I started learning iOS development, I started it alone — watching YouTube videos, stack overflow, some paid courses. I was the only iOS developer where I used to work, so I just coded what I knew. I had a habit of researching alone and doing the assigned tasks without the opinion of other iOS developers.

After nearly, 1.5 years of doing iOS alone, I joined EB Pearls— a big tech company here in Nepal. There were around 15 iOS developers there. In my initial days at EB Pearls, I still had the same habit of diving into my Jira tickets without even discussing them with my other iOS dev colleagues- even if it was a challenging task.

Later on, I realized that talking to your colleagues about how they would try solving that issue you’re stuck in for days, gave a completely new perspective. Sometimes, I got to know in-built or external APIs that I didn’t even know existed. This helped me to escalate my skills as an iOS developer as I was literally learning new patterns, skills on a daily basis with my colleagues. For the iOS folks reading this — the skill I learned so quickly which I had been dumb-founded for weeks was RxSwift and Reactive programming, MVVM.

After I left EB Pearls, I joined a company where I was again a solo iOS developer there. I missed talking about the latest and greatest Swift versions, iOS, and Apple stuffs. I missed having a fresh perspective of another iOS developer on the tasks that I was doing. In this time, I got to learn to integrate GraphQL Apis.

Then the lockdown happened here in Nepal. We’re all working from home then. At that time, I realized that my growth as an iOS developer got so slow. I wasn’t motivated by what I was doing then. So, I started doing my personal projects during the lockdown. I also learned Fastlane and a few CI/CD concepts.

During the lockdown, I applied and got selected to a company where I work now — Oozou 😊. Here, I got a chance to talk with amazing iOS developers (virtually 🥲) with amazing skill sets. Talking with them and the projects that I got the chance to work on motivated me a lot. This made me realize that it’s really helpful if you’re surrounded by amazing people that share your interests. Here, I got to learn and still learning- Unit tests, SwiftUI, Combine, CI/CD pipeline, custom SPM.

Then, I got a chance to teach someone whom I knew from before but never thought she would deep-dive in the iOS development world. That person is Shreeya Maskey. I got a chance to teach her from basics of iOS development, and it’s been about 8 months and she is already been hired to an amazing company in India and she is rocking with her skills. This girl will be a super-duper talent in this industry.

Working closely with her, I got to teach iOS but I got to learn so much from her as well- both technical and soft skills. People say teaching is a great way of learning, and I completely agree with it. I find her to be very hard-working and that inspires me to be a better developer myself. Now, with her new skill set, she is teaching me SwintInject, Repository Pattern, Clean Architecture.

Coding all by yourself is okay, but you should try finding a coding buddy — that will inspire you and keep you motivated. ✌️