🤙 A Day in the Life of a Mobile Engineer

Dani Sandoval tells us how they roll on Stuart’s mobile team

I’m Dani, Senior iOS Engineer @ Stuart, father of two boys, and I build human towers in my free time.

I joined Stuart in September 2015, so I’m one of the first employees of the company.

Way back in 2007, on a holiday trip to New York, Apple had just released the first iPhone. I was lucky enough to be able to try it at the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue and, since that very moment, I decided I wanted to develop apps for that device*.

The rest, as they say, is history 😁

A Castell — the traditional Catalan human tower.

What’s daily life like on the mobile team?

Our main focus is to provide a top-notch mobile experience for our clients. We work hard to implement useful, intelligent, and fun features to make the experience simple and powerful.

Our process usually involves meeting with the business team, product people, designers, and fellow backend engineers to discuss how to best implement the next cool new feature.

We also like to use the latest technology provided by Apple and Google, so we constantly refactor and improve our codebase keeping it up-to-date. We want to make sure that we are able to take full advantage of all of their new features!

In addition to daily development life, we have a lot of freedom to develop ourselves and grow our knowledge. We’re free to tackle challenges in the best way we see fit, and to invest time in learning new mobile APIs and emerging technologies such as Kotlin, Siri, Rx, Swift, and ESP WiFi chips.

We can summarise our feelings on research and education with the following quote:

CFO: “What happens if we invest in developing our people and then they leave us?”
CEO: “What happens if we don’t, and they stay?”

This freedom and trust is a long term investment for the company, allowing us to create the best possible solutions.

What interesting challenges has the team been solving recently?

We completely redesigned the client application from the ground up to add a slick new user interface that’s much simpler to use. Right now, we’re working on an overhaul of our Stuart courier application which will take advantage of our data science team’s work on optimising package delivery.

We also work as an R&D lab. Last year we created two working prototypes (even developing the hardware!) that served as proof of concept for future Stuart products. Having the possibility to work on this is is immensely fun and rewarding!

What’s it like working at Stuart?

Stuart is an amazing place to work, for various reasons:

1. Work/life balance. The company is committed to making it easy for us to be able to balance our personal and professional lives. There’s no fixed schedule, a flexible work-from-home policy, the salary is good, we have health insurance, a lunch allowance, and restaurant vouchers.
2. Social events. We work hard, and play hard too! My friends freak out when I tell them everything we do: company off-sites, cocktail workshops, theme park visits, escape rooms, whisky tastings, etc.
3. Colleagues. We’re a friendly bunch of very competent people. You can always rely on your colleagues because every single one of them is committed to building excellent things.

* And no, I’m not allergic to Helium 🎈

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