Full-Time Indie iOS Dev and Music Enthusiast: A Top Dev Interview With Alex Andrews

Love for tech

What do you think the future is for Swift?

I really enjoy using Swift, and compared to the other languages I’ve worked with it’s definitely my personal favorite. Especially seeing the broader Swift community in action over the past couple years, there’s no doubt there’s real momentum—and every new Swift release is better and better.

Also, listening to Chris Lattner discuss Swift’s place at Apple on a recent Accidental Tech podcast, it definitely doesn’t sound like the language is going anywhere but forward. So, I think it’ll just keep getting more refined and more popular—and that popularity is pretty well deserved.

I can see you love to play around with new technologies like building tools with Python, how do you find the time to keep learning new things alongside working on projects?

For the most part, I don’t do “work work” in the evenings or weekends, but I find that sometimes I really want to code something up in my spare time. That tension seems to create a good environment for side projects, as they feel like hobbies then and don’t burn me out too much.

I have a couple friends who are really into building their own tools too, and I find that pretty motivating. For example, a friend of mine is slowly moving his entire life into Terminal and he’ll share all his vim adventures, Terminal-based email clients and whatnot with me, and that’s really interesting and it motivates me to double-down on my own little projects (e.g., custom Sublime markdown syntax, binding framework, etc.). So, a big +1 for the community.

A key motivator, Adrian Kosmaczewski

Also, reading this article last year got me keen to read a whole lot more books, and that’s been really rewarding. I find that the more I read, the more I want to. Thanks, Adrian Kosmaczewski, for the motivation!

Making your own tools, can you share a good example when you made a great tool and what benefits it gave you?

Yes, I’d love to! A recent one is a little Terminal app called “Workflows.”

Every time I do one of those “once in a while” tasks, say localizing an app, troubleshooting a git push error, or simulating a coordinate tap in UI Testing, I write up a quick text file describing how I did it. Maybe it’s just me, but I forget some of this stuff literally seconds after I do it… so, being able to load up these text files when needed saves me a lot of time.

Needless to say, I have one folder on my computer with many, many of these text files and finding the right one was becoming a bit of a hassle. So last summer I was looking to practise some Python and TDD, and I put together “Workflows” to search through these workflow documents and print any matches directly to the console. So, I type something like “wf -w git push error” then the matching doc pops up. It’s super simple but very handy.

Where To Go From Here?

And that concludes our Top App Dev Interview with Alex Andrews. Huge thanks to Alex for sharing his indie life, his love for Swift and finally running a successful company Ten Kettles.

We hope you enjoyed this inspiring interview and if you’re thinking of starting your own company or eager to make the leap to become freelance to take Alex’s advice to heart.

Also, if anyone wants to say hi on Twitter, @leakywellington (or @tenkettles) and if they want to find out more about Ten Kettles’ apps, the best place is tenkettles.com!

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