Phlippie Bosman

Mobile software engineer with 8 years' experience creating digital products, specialising in Swift/iOS mobile applications, with exposure to the full stack. Team and technical lead biased for action. Passionate about clean software design and ergonomics, continuous learning and knowledge sharing, and excellent user experiences.

Posts

Technical blog posts, field reports, and opinions about Swift, software design, and programming in general. Nothing here is written by an AI.

Publish your iOS app faster by offloading key features

If you plan your project well, you can include key functionalities without needing to do much custom implementation, by relying on vanilla features included in the iOS development ecosystem. This post is about some things you can offload to get your app out the door faster.

Bizarro inheritance

When you really think about it, what *is* inheritance in object orientation? Intuitively, we tend to think of it as an "is a"-relationship. A car *is a* vehicle. A house *is a* building. A dog *is an* animal. But from a programming language perspective, the way it works can be expressed in a different way — as "has a" + fancy syntax.

Double optional bindings or something idk

I soon ran into a use case where I wanted to use an optional to control showing an edit sheet, and to indicate to that sheet whether it should edit or create an item. Interestingly, this implies that the correct type for the item binding is an optional of an optional item — Double optionals or something idk. The outer optional is the binding that controls showing the sheet. The inner optional indicates whether the item to edit is new or an existing item.

The resume as a software micro-project

The process of producing a CV to apply for a role is a lot like releasing software to production. Rather than being a once-off assignment, the content of a CV is quite fluid. Experience and skills get added, yes, but furthermore, each job application requires you to cater the resume to appeal to the specific job.
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Feed

Talks

The phlippieb.dev site now has a section for Talks. It doesn't have a lot of content yet -- most of my talks have been at private sessions at Retro Rabbit. Nevertheless, I think it's worth showcasing the ones that have links to share.

Daily Budget v1.4: New widget, tips, notes, quick entry, and more

Daily budget v1.4 is rolling out on the App Store soon. This update is quite packed! Here are the shiny new things. New widget. Designed to complement the "Available Today" widget, the new "Spent Today" widget shows you your total expenses for the day. Pro tip combine these widgets in a stack!

Daily Budget v1.3: Now with widgets!

Daily budget v1.3 is available on the App Store. This update adds widgets, allowing you to see your daily allowance and expenditure at a glance.

phlippieb.dev is live

My personal website, phlippieb.dev, is live! It was built in a few days using Astro JS. I couldn't find a template I liked, and also liked the idea of making it exactly to my liking, so the content and styling was all done by hand in HTML and CSS. See the footer for a link to the source.
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Work

Projects

Side-projects outside of client work. (See my resume for details about my work as a consultant.) These are complete, standalone applications.

Daily Budget app ↗︎

A simple iOS budgeting app, written in pure SwiftUI and SwiftData.

This website ↗︎

Statically-generated personal portfolio and blog built with Astro JS

Jakaranda 20 ↗︎

Mobile app to guide members of the Jakaranda Wynproe Gilde through tasting and scoring wines. Still in specification phase.

Markdown resume ↗︎

Software-microproject for writing my resume in markdown and generating PDF and web versions
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Packages

Publically available helper packages, typically created as solutions to work-related challenges and then open-sourced.

PHBStackLayout ↗︎

A μFramework that provides declarative syntax for UIStackView-based layouts in Swift.

CollectionVerifier ↗︎

A helper micro-framework for verifying a collection of items, where the collection has a strict count.

PHBApplying ↗︎

Applying is simply syntactic sugar. It is a method that applies a given closure to a receiving object

PHBNibless ↗︎

View and view controller with parameter-less initialisers.
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Open source contributions

twofas/2fas-ios/pull/140 ↗︎
realm/SwiftLint/pull/5487 ↗︎
zxh0/vscode-proto3/pull/83 ↗︎
realm/realm-swift/pull/6533 ↗︎

View all open source contributions

Talks

Saying what you mean ↗︎
Developer User Group MeetUp
Swift protocol witnesses ↗︎
Tech Talk at Retro Rabbit
Coding with bumpers on ↗︎
Tech Talk at Retro Rabbit
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Resume

Professional resume ↗︎

View my full professional resume.

About my resume

My resume is open source, written in markdown/HTML/CSS, managed as a trunk-based-development software mini-project, and published through GitHub Pages. Read about it.

Skills

I have over 8 years' professional experience as a mobile software engineer, primarily focusing on iOS mobile application development, with exposure to the full stack. I've worked in environments ranging from lean startups to enterprises. My skills include hands-on production experience with the following:

iOS engineering
Swift
Objective-C
SwiftUI
SwiftData
UIKit
Share extensions
Widgets
Localization
Certificates and profiles management
App Store and Test Flight deployment
iOS frameworks and tools
Realm
Firebase
RxSwift
SwiftyJSON
AutoLayout
SwiftLint
Fastlane
Networking
REST
gRPC
Protocol buffers
Go middleware
Testing
Unit testing
XCTest framework
Quick/Nimble
TDD
Other mobile engineering
Flutter
Dart
Ionic
Other stack exposure
Relational databases
Node.js
Vue.js
CI/CD
Bitrise
GitHub Actions
Methodologies
Agile
Scrum

About

Phlippie rhymes with Clippy
Fluent in English and Afrikaans
iOS developer at Retro Rabbit
South Africa
GMT+2
He/him

Email: [email protected]
GitHub: phlippieb
LinkedIn: Phlippie Bosman
Stack Overflow: Phlippie Bosman

If you want to support my work, you can buy me coffee

(I also make music)