I am an Engineer meets Designer. With a focus on large scale, high impact, Open Source projects. I care about how developer ecosystems work.
I've spent most of my life focused on building iOS/Mac native apps and tools, and JavaScript tooling for the last few years.
MAstodon is my main, if quiet, outlet: @orta@webtoo.ls
Today, I head up tech at Puzzmo. If you are here because I posted about a job, email puzzmo-fe@orta.io
Working with Em Lazer-Walker and Zach Gage we explored an unconventional take on Flappy Bird for mobile and web. It's a cruel game with no win state, from which of 20 million birds have flapped out.
I've been helping out some of my favourite JavaScript dev-tools by re-designing and consolidating their homepages.
Working with Franco Meloni we used some of the Danger JS tech created for Peril to create a way for iOS folks to own their Dangerfiles.
Danger in Swift is a nice trip back home after graduating to a new community.
Over time Artsy's engineering documentation became fragmented, rarely updated and with few contributors.
I consolidated all docs, open sourced most and created a process for finding or creating new docs.
Working with Brian Watterson and Katarina Batina we created an augmented reality experience to the Artsy app using Apple's bleeding-edge ARKit 1.5.
Bit stressful because of technical constraints (and the vague-ness of reality), but we found a way to make it work.
I took Danger to the server, expanding the scope of automation for cultural rules to be anything related to GitHub
At Artsy, Peril lets us apply minimal viable process in all sorts of new and interesting places by mixing schedulers and webhook processing
If Artsy was moving to JS for iOS, we needed to have our tools to come with us.
Re-writing Danger for JS gave me the chance to fix fundamental blockers for creating a considerably larger Danger eco-system of tools.
When Eloy Durán pitched we should move to React Native at Artsy, I helped his idea not just work - but succeed.
My contributions ranged from documenting our process, pitching stake-holders, choosing, owning and improving dependencies and helping to establish a high quality engineering culture across the shared web and iOS infrastructure .
Working with Felix Krause we created a way to write tests in a way that couldn't exist before.
Danger is a feedback and testing system for looking at the environment of your code reviews.
Working with Eloy Durán and Nate West. We built a hosted environment for all of CocoaPods' environment.
We went all out as an IDE for understanding your Podfile. Auto-completion, inline errors, migration advice and an integration overview.
Working with Owen Dodd and Katarina Batina we created a beautiful way to experience current exhibitions from galleries and museums around the world on your TV.
Small scope, tight deadline and a great working design/dev relationship.
With help from Daniel Doubrovkine I transformed the Artsy Mobile team to be Open Source by default.
We started small, and over the course of a year I made a lot of hard calls and eventually came out with all of our apps available for others to learn from.
Over the course of years, me and a bunch of internet random contributors eventually shipped a Mac app for quickly finding GIFs.
Took far too long to make.
I worked with Ash Furrow, Katarina Batina and 1aura Brown. We built an app for browsing works, swiping cards and making auction bids. We did it in Swift, in the Open.
I worked with Rob Bohnke, dB., 1aura Brown and Katarina Batina. We made the fair experience mobile. Opening out with The Armory Fair 2014, and moving around the world.
Consolidate the documentation, helped create the brand. The tentpole project for Open Source in iOS/Mac/watchOS/tvOS world.
Built with Andy Myers, Florian Hanke & the CocoaPods Team.
Got $100,000 to spend on Artworks? Or just happen to be interested in exploring the art world. This app has you covered.
Featured weekly in the App Store globally, entirely Open Source.
Initially built with Robert Lenne & Leonard Grey.
My initial dive into large scale OSS projects is CocoaDocs. CocoaDocs would host every CocoaPods' documentation for free, automatically.
Put.IO for iOS was a universal app that aims for the best user experience on the app store. It has iCloud syncing, in-app search and 16 language subtitle support. At last check the app has streamed over 100000 hours of video.
And is totally open source. Shame though, Apple stopped allowing it through the review process. So it's not on the App Store anymore.
I worked with Robert Lenne, Benjamin Jackson and Leonard Grey. To make a stunning portfolio app for museums and art galleries around the world.
Folio deals with downloading gigabytes of images and metadata. The app exposes no Apple styled views unobtrusively leaving the content itself to make its own statements. Lots of cool animations.
Mixtapes was created so I could make new playlists for friends that could change as we change. I update my Mixtapes for a certain someone weekly.
Free, open source & needs a paid Spotify account.
I took over maintenance of a well-used extension for the last few years without using it myself.
I started, and handed-off a well-used VS Code extension for Jest.
I created a process for improving processes by taking the best ideas from big OSS projects.
I documented the things that makes Engineering unique.
I help out with the Jest testing library for JavaScript.
I ported over a JS tool for git-hooks to Swift.
I built a CocoaPods Plugin to automatically host-fix React Native with CocoaPods.
I built a SwiftPM package for consolidating the configuration for build tools.
I built a system for using GitHub issues for comments on static sites, see the blog post on the Artsy blog.
I have co-run a Peer Lab in NYC for three years.
I co-ran a conference at Facebook London for iOS developers looking to understand React Native better.
I helped run a public set of workshops teaching how each part of the JavaScript stack at Artsy works.
I took over maintenance of Specta and Expecta, the BDD testing frameworks for the Cocoa community.
I provide an odd, but interesting, mentorship role to the RxSwift project.
I help out at a non-for-profit bringing new people into the tech sphere in NYC.
Resources for 3 learn Swift courses for anyone to run in their own company. 2 years running now.
I spent a year talking and figuring out how to provide useful metrics on the quality of a library in the Cocoa ecosystem.
CocoaPods became the first dependency manager to actually say how many projects are using your library. Others provide raw download numbers which are easily skewed.
Only Common Files and Danger ATM.
Seriously though, credit goes to Microsoft for the amazing editor.
The CocoaPods website now provides enough information that you don't need to open the homepage of a Pod to make a decision on it's value.
Global community outreach. Hanging out with cool CocoaPods users around the world and requesting that they talk about their work.
I consolidated all of the CocoaPods documentation, and reference materials into a single website.
A maintained and opinionated collection of settings for AppCode. You should experiment with it.
I started keeping track of things I need to do in a github life issues. You should too.
pt is a gem that is a command line interface to pivotal tracker. It's a much faster way to create new issues, and to get an overview of your things to do.
A generic API for different analytics platforms on iOS. A useful library used in 5 apps of mine now.
You can't trick me. It's stacks all the way down. Artsy's iOS app lives by this motto.
Apple deprecated me - whoooo!
Chairs makes hot-swapping iOS simulator app directories easy. Dealing with migrations and large syncs is now not so time consuming.
I wrote a text adventure game framework to help kids learn objective-c. I nowadays I make people presents in the form of simple games with this.
A screensaver for the Mac showing people completing videogames so you don't have to.
The easiest way to set your desktop background to some awesome wallpapers. Powered by the reddit search from GIFs. Check it here.
I used to run a meetup in manchester called NSManchester. Then I moved to NYC.
Wuthering Bytes, Hebden Bridge, England - 14th Sept 2013 Looking after an Open Source community - video
NSSpain - Logrono, Spain - 18th Sept 2013 From Submodules to Private Cocoapods - How to move your infrastructure to private pods for smarter dependency management.
goto; conference - Aarhus, Denmark - 1st Oct 2013 CocoaPods, the Objective-C Dependency Manager We've Been Waiting For. - video
Mobile Central Europe - Warsaw, Poland - 11th Jan 2014 CocoaPods and the road to 1.0 - video slides
Nickelodeon HQ - NYC, USA - 31st Jan 2014 How does CocoaPods work?
Snow*Mobile - Madison, WI, USA - Feb 21st 2014 CocoaPods and the road to 1.0 - slides
Tumblr HQ - NYC, USA - 26th Feb 2014 How to hijack an Open Source Community for Internet Points
mdevcon - Amsterdam, The Netherlands - March 8th 2014 CocoaPods and the road to 1.0
Istanbul Tech Talks, Istanbul, Turkey - 28th April 2014 Mobile and the Art world - video
UIKonf - Berlin, Germany - 16th May 2014 CocoaPods and Documentation - slides video
CocoaPods State of the Union - San Francisco, USA - 2nd June 2014 Host, and gave overview of what has happened in the year.
Altconf - San Francisco, USA - 3rd Jun 2014 Project Eigen Post Mortem - video slides
CocoaHeads StockHolm, Stockholm, Sweden - July 7th 2014 Ways to Start Open Source
Gilt HQ - NYC, USA 20th August iOS at Artsy - slides
Brooklyn iOS - NYC, USA - 21st August 2014 iOS at Artsy - slides
#pragma mark, Milan, Italy. 3rd October 2014 CocoaPods
Yet Another Conference, Moscow Russia, 30th October 2014 Tools, Testing and new New Team Members. The Story of Post 1.0 App - video
Brooklyn Swift Developers - NYC, USA - November 13th, 2014 Swift Under the Deadline - video slides
CocoaHeads NYC - April 9th 2015 How the Artsy Mobile Team works in the Open
New York Times HQ - 14th April 2015 How the Artsy Mobile Team works in the Open
Self Conference - Detroit, NYC - 30th May 2015 Contributing to Open Source Doesn’t Require Changing the World
CocoaPods State of the Union - San Francisco, USA - 8th June 2015 Host, and gave overview of what has happened in the year.
Altconf - San Francisco - 9th June 2015 Being Nice in Open Source - video
MobileOptimized - Minsk, Belarus - 14th July 2015 Being Nice in Open Source - slides
ortatherox NYC/UK
Omni-Engineer at Puzzmo
I rarely blog here: orta.io/rebase
I wrote tech here: artsy.github.io and blog.puzzmo.com
I make stuff here: github.com/orta