iOS Enthusiast and Community-Driven Developer, Jordan Morgan
Welcome to another Buffer Community Slack Live Chat recap. This week we talked to one of Buffer’s iOS Developers Jordan Morgan.
Here’s more from Jordan:
What do I do: Hey there — my name is Jordan and I’m an iOS developer at Buffer. Aside from iOS development, I’ve also recently been putting an emphasis on writing on our engineering blog, speaking at events and thinking about open source at Buffer.
Where I hang my hat: I live in Ozark, Missouri with my beautiful wife and our toddler, Bennett!
What else you should know about me: In my spare time, I write an iOS blog, teach online iOS courses and of course release my own apps :)
iOS blog:
https://medium.com/the-traveled-ios-developers-guide
iOS courses:
Apps:
Welcome, Jordan ! Thanks for joining us today! 😃 Thanks to all who are here too! ✋
Woohoo — thanks for having me Alfred Lua!! Excited to chat!
Community-Driven Developer
What does it mean to be a community-driven developer? — Alfred Lua
This one is definitely something that I think about a lot, because engineers are inherently very community driven 😊 We have conferences, user groups, blogs, courses and discussions happening every single day in this industry, and that’s one thing that drew me to it!
So, when I think of community driven development — I think of “How can I develop software transparently?” In other words, how can I create things that solve my problems, and others too! So many people invested (and still do 😊 ) in me to succeed as a programmer — I definitely want to give that back! So I try to blog, release open source software, do talks and anything else that connects me to others in the community, or introduces other people to the awesome world of programming!
Programming and iOS Development
What drew you to explore programming as a career? Did you go to school for Computer Science or were you self-taught? — Joshua Price
To kind of tie in to what Joshua Price asked — I am both self taught (I taught myself iOS) and went to school (for Computer Information Science). The great thing about programming is once you learn the fundamentals — you can kind of branch out and learn whichever language you are interested in. For me — that’s always been iOS 😊
Hi Jordan, thanks for coming and sharing with us today 😊 What drew you to iOS work when it comes to development? — Stephen M Banham
Oh awesome one Stephen M Banham!! If you look into any of my side projects or writing, you may notice that I love iOS development a whole lot 😊! Where I live, there aren’t really any iOS development careers (in SouthWest Missouri) — and I was super lucky to find a position out of college that at least had some iOS work involved with it!
Hey Jordan! 👋 Here’s something I’m always intrigued about when I meet iOS developers, are you developing native or are you using a tool like Xamarin? (Or are you in the process to migrating to a tool like Xamarin?) — Dray Wharton
Good one Dray Wharton — that’s such an awesome discussion! So for us, we develop natively across both major platforms (iOS and Android). We do that for a few reasons, and there are so many pros and cons with going either route. I will say, I do miss C# though 😊 I started my career in Windows development!
Communication
Jordan: I’m a marketer working closely with developers for the first time on a scrum team. Is there anything that marketers should note when communicating with more tech-savvy people? I know it can seem like two different languages from dev to marketing! Any pet peeves? 😁 — Erica Tafavoti
I think when I’ve been in that situation, I’ve always been super glad to help. I think a lot of developers, once they’ve been around for some time — they really “get” it, ya know 😊? This stuff sounds like another language if you aren’t a developer! I feel like I have a unique view on this first hand, as my wife is an emergency room nurse.
She will come home and say things like “I had to start an IV because the patient was in v-tac and I had to push two millimeters of (insert huge drug name here)!” She will then see my blank face and smile warmly and put it in terms that I understand, i.e. — the patient was having a heart attack!
All that to say — I think as developers we just need to try and do the same when communicating about our work with others. I couldn’t tell my wife “I fixed a runtime exception that was caused by going out of bounds in an array I was using for my data layer!” So I would say there aren’t really any pet peeves, because I think developers understand that the things we work on every day are not directly relatable to people outside of the industry 😊 I hope that helps answer your question somewhat!
iOS Engineering at Buffer
Jordan: just wondering if you guys take a mobile first approach to development or is it always multi-channel when you’re working on new features for Buffer? —James Qualtrough
I’m sure the answer might have been different a few years ago when Andy (our iOS lead) was developing Buffer for iOS by himself. At that time, I sense it might have been more about reaching feature parity with the web app.
Fast forward to now, though, and we have three iOS developers (myself, Andy and Humber — who are both amazing engineers!). When we look at things to do, we don’t always look at what the web app has and try to directly translate it to mobile. A great example of that is the calendar on Buffer’s web app 😊 We don’t know if that paradigm would translate smoothly over to iOS, possibly the iPad Pro maybe?
So, I think it’s less about keeping up with what Buffer’s web app has, and more about saying “How do we create a pure, smooth and native Buffer experience on iOS? What would that look like”, and then we identify features from there 😊.
To reverse it a bit — one thing we have on the app that’s not (I think?) in Buffer.com is drafts. On mobile — you may have a morning commute or not have reception. So, it makes sense that we would allow users to create a post when they are offline, and they when they come back online — go ahead and Buffer it 😊!
Speaking of agile, what are the methodology breakdown and tools the Buffer engineering team use? — Gary Yau Chan
So for me being on the mobile team — we’re actually one of the smaller parts of Buffer engineering. The whole team consists of me, Andy and Humber on iOS, and Tom and Marcus on Android. Because of that — we are fortunate that communication happens super fast and fluid. We are still at the size on our team where we can easily sense what the other parts of the team are doing 😊
That leads to a very, very loose structure in terms of processes. We do lean heavily on Github’s issue feature, which is where we list the things that we are/will work on 😊 Typically, discussion may happen before those issues go up (i.e. Andy working on Instagram Reminders, woop woop!) to smaller things we will just open a ticket for ourselves (i.e. “Text is clipping on this screen in landscape orientation).
This leads to my one of my favorite Buffer memories in my bootcamp! We had just pushed out a release, and some code I wrote would cause a crash in some edge cases. So — Andy and I saw that, and he just said “Cool — you wanna fix it?” and I was like “Uh, YES!!” In my previous positions, there were more processes to follow and rightfully so because the organizations were so much larger, that’s what worked for them and there’s nothing wrong with that. At Buffer, though, it’s more about if we see a need — we just go and fix it and I LOVE that 😊!
Good question, Gary Yau Chan… I’m also curious how you promote your vision of the Product Roadmap internally amongst your fellow Bufferoos? —Dray Wharton
Awesome thought on the roadmap Dray Wharton! Also, we have our roadmap completely open to the public too:
The short answer is that at Buffer, anyone can have a say on the roadmap and contribute to the discussion, which is so awesome!
Now for the longer answer 😊…
For mobile, we’ve been thinking a lot about what we’re doing in the mobile space. Right now, we’ve got Buffer for iOS and Android. But — could we do more? Are there more apps that we cold make that would help push the Buffer journey, values and usefulness further?
For us, we think that answer is likely yes. There are some really great opportunities we think we could execute on to make users even more happy. Immediately what comes to mind is Respond, bringing back Daily in some form or an incarnation of Pablo on iOS. So — we toss these ideas around amongst the team and see what might “stick”, so to speak 😊 If it feels right, we then kind of escalate the talks a bit further, and bring in other teams for advice (like the super awesome Product team, Jim and Kyle and others to name a few)!
To wrap up — if someone at Buffer has an idea, and thinks it will be an awesome initiative — we talk about it, perhaps drum up a prototype, and then bring in more advice and go from there! This is kind of how Pablo happened, and it’s how we got the idea to create an app for our Retreats too!
Life as a Buffer Employee
What would you say is your greatest challenge within the buffer lifestyle? — Stephen M Banham
For me, the biggest challenge was around the freedom that Buffer and remote work allows for you to have 😊 To better elaborate, I am someone who always worked in an office settings, and by my pure presence of being there — I could think to myself “My team knows I am giving them 100%” (or 💯 if you prefer emoji 😊 )
So, when I started — I had to really seek out advice and ask the amazing Bufferoos who’d been doing this for awhile how to tackle that! And really — it just comes to the insane amount of trust we have in one another (my favorite part of being at Buffer!).
During my bootcamp, my culture buddy Tom (who is now our mobile engineering lead!) told me something along the lines of “Nobody is counting the hours you work — we know you’re busy! We know you’re contributing!” — and that allowed me to think less about “Oh I need be online on Slack from 7:00 am — 9:00 pm!” and more about “Where can I go today, and do my best work and be most happy” It’s such a crazy shift from what I was used to, but it’s so rewarding! We believe in changing the way we approach work, and I think there is this divide we subconsciously put between “life” and “work”, where at Buffer we are saying “Why can’t the two just live happily together!?” 😊
To tail off on that a bit more, this morning I thought to myself “I’d love to work at my coworking space today!” and I got there, and it was a unusually quite day (I was the only one there). So then I had the thought of doing this AMA in my own house, with the windows open and the sun shining in — because that’s where I would be most happy. So, here I am 😊
Jordan — is it weird that we all know what you earn? — Dray Wharton
I can answer that one fairly quick — and for me, it doesn’t bother me 😊 I love that we have that in the open, I think it helps with a lot of complex scenarios in the workplace that could arise, and also breeds trust across the team 😊 It was one of the things I was super passionate about when looking to join Buffer!
Professional Growth / Other
What kind of speaking engagements do you do Jordan? Is that something you enjoy?- Sami Grady
I love, love LOVE speaking! I am pretty social by default, I love chatting and meeting new people 😊 In kind of sounds funny, but in college public speaking class was something I really enjoyed and looked forward to! Right now, I am actively looking to speak at iOS Developers Conference as that’s always been a dream of mine!
I do quite a few talks locally, and just did one last week 😊 I usually cover remote working, life at Buffer or the technical talks covering iOS. Being at conferences and groups absolutely, positively makes me 😊 and energized — and I think Buffer also has so many awesome stories to tell! And vice-versa, going to these types of things makes you super aware that every single person has a story, and you can learn from each one of them!
If you ever want to peek at my slides from my talks, I also have most of them here I believe 😊 :
Thank you so much for the amazing and super thoughtful answers, Jordan! It was so amazing chatting with you today! Thank you to all who are here too!
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