Meet the team: Florian Preknya

Q&A with one of our iOS Engineers

What does the day of an iOS Engineer look like at SwissBorg?

A typical day for an iOS Engineer at SwissBorg closely mirrors the routine of iOS engineers at other companies.

In the morning we have squad daily meetings, and then we focus on our daily priorities, such as developing new features, addressing bug fixes, or working on refactoring assignments. Throughout the day, we engage in a variety of activities, including ad-hoc and scheduled meetings, synchronization sessions with our squad or mobile peers, code reviews, and technical discussions.

Additionally, we allocate time for continuous learning, some squads having a formalized schedule for this purpose. When feasible, we work on lower-priority tasks, such as iOS platform initiatives or experimenting with new ideas and technologies. Every two weeks, one iOS engineer volunteers to supervise the release train, ensuring the successful deployment of a new app version on the App Store, even though production processes are highly automated.

You are a part of our Platform squad — what is the purpose of this team?

If the other squads are feature-oriented, each of them claiming a piece from the business domain pie, the Platform team serves a different role. A mobile engineer from the Platform team is responsible for several key functions:

• Providing support to fellow mobile engineers, by implementing workflow automation, maintaining the CI/CD pipeline, or creating generic purpose components
• Offering support to other departments (operations, marketing, growth), typically by evaluating technical solutions and integrating third-party libraries
• Maintaining the structure and overall sanity of the mobile projects, by addressing tech debt, proposing refactoring sessions, updating dependencies, etc. This effort is a collective one, but the Platform team plays a particularly active role in this context.
• Handling diverse tasks that don’t fit under the umbrella of any specific feature squad

You’ve been at SwissBorg for four years this October. What has kept you working here for all this time?

Indeed, time flies so fast when you enjoy what you’re doing!

In these four years, I’ve witnessed the SwissBorg app being born, and I’ve seen it grow with each released version, feature by feature, evolving and unfolding its great potential. It’s an immense satisfaction for me to be part of this journey!

How did you get into mobile development?

My entry into mobile development was driven by curiosity and a desire for a change — I left behind extensive experience in Windows desktop app development with C++. As someone with a strong affinity for visual design and a particular interest in user interface development, the mobile engineering world seemed like a natural choice to me.

Tell us about something challenging that you’ve worked on lately

One of my latest efforts was to introduce Kotlin Multiplatform in our iOS project. Initially started as an R&D initiative in collaboration with my Android developer counterpart from the Platform team, it swiftly became evident that sharing a source of truth and logic with the Android codebase was a major hit, so we planned to have it in production.

There were a set of technical challenges in our way, especially on the iOS side (for example, wrapping Kotlin coroutine flows to RxSwift observables).

Integrating KMP in a brownfield project was quite a complex task, requiring the creation of infrastructure and adapters to ensure a smooth cohabitation of new imported Kotlin types and functionalities with our existing native codebase. It also included CI/CD pipeline refinement, documentation authoring, and numerous other facets.

How do you and your team stay up to date with the latest technologies?

There are many mobile development sources we follow, and each of us has our own list of favourite authors, blogs, open-source projects, etc.

In the iOS team, we share interesting stuff on Slack, sometimes discussing them in our weekly iOS platform meeting. Of course, we closely follow official Apple events such as the famous WWDC, but we are also interested in other mobile conferences. Personally, I’ve begun attending the KotlinConf workshops to explore the multi-platform topic.

What do you like the most about working at SwissBorg?

The remarkable quality of the people working at SwissBorg is something I didn’t find previously in my career. Every interaction I’ve had is not just great on a professional level, but also deeply human.

There is a combo of ingredients, including trust, empowerment, a compelling roadmap, and frictionless management, producing some sort of alchemy that motivates our team to bring on their best possible selves.

What is one interesting and random fact about yourself?

Some time ago, I was considering quitting engineering and focusing on a musical career. I was playing guitar in a band and I took music very seriously, practising a lot, conducting rehearsals, and performing gigs. It became more than a hobby, but it was hard to keep my professional standards in both engineering and music at the same time, so I had to choose.