Become a better iOS engineer: back to first principles

After 4+ years shipping production apps with Swift, UIKit and SwiftUI, I know something every experienced engineer eventually admits: shipping features every day doesn’t automatically make you better at the fundamentals.

So I built myself a roadmap — everything an iOS engineer should truly own, from memory management and concurrency to the design decisions behind SwiftUI — and this series is me working through it in writing, from first principles.

Why write about it?

Three reasons:

1. Writing is the ultimate test of mastery. If I can’t explain a concept simply, I don’t own it yet — no matter how many times I’ve shipped it to production.
2. The basics deserve better explanations. Most tutorials rush past the why. I want to write the explanations I wish I’d found when it mattered.
3. Accountability. A public series is harder to abandon than a private notes folder.

What to expect

Short, practical posts. Each one takes a topic from the roadmap — some elemental, some deep in the internals — and explains it the way production experience taught me to see it, with real Swift code where it helps.

If you’re an iOS engineer sharpening your craft — or a recruiter wondering how I think — this series is the most honest picture of me you’ll find. See you in the next post.