Posts we liked
If you’re like Christian Selig, the author of this post, you often have multiple versions of Xcode installed: one or two beta versions, a stable version, and maybe another version in case the most recent stable version has something weird about it. He wanted to map a hotkey that would grab the currently open version of Xcode instead of a specific version and you might want that too.
Unless you’re an Android developer, then you might like this post instead:
Breaking free from Android Studio
IO Dev Blue looks at how to harness the full potential of Gradle for building and running projects independently from Android Studio. Android Studio acts as an intermediary between Gradle and a developer providing a user-friendly interface to make the build and compile process simpler and easier, but it can be resource-intensive and slow especially for developers working on low-memory setups. What if you could work independently from it?
Consultative QA as a way to empower engineering teams
Consultative QA aims to push the responsibility of quality control onto the developer while keeping the overarching support and assurance of a QA seasoned tester directly involved. At Jon Leigh’s company, they loop in QA almost from the beginning of development, specifically when a developer has completed an Architectural Decision Record. Sounds pretty cool. You too can be cool by reading Jon’s guide.
Developer Stuart Varral documents his initial experience porting an existing iOS app (about cricket, the sport not the insect) to visionOS. Get a full look at how he took a windowless app that was originally built exclusively on an iPad using Swift Playgrounds and got it painlessly up-and-running on visionOS. Â Â Â
Posts we wrote
Autopilot didn't make pilots obsolete and CI/CD won’t save your team
If there was ever a blog post that was meant to be in the first edition of our newsletter, it’s this one. Our co-founder and CEO, Gabriel Savit (who is both a mobile software and aerospace engineer) walks through all the ways CI/CD is like an airplane’s autopilot, for both good and bad.
Why should you do pre-release build distribution? How should you?
No combination of planning, design, and test automation can absolutely perfect your product and features. People also need to tap and pinch away on your app to catch bugs, test usability, root out problems with your delivery process, and make sure new features are as useful as you’d like them to be. Our co-founder Isabel Barrera details how to get your own pre-release build distribution program up and running.
Cherry-picks vs backmerges: which is better?
Sometimes (maybe even all the time) you need to make changes to a release branch after that branch has been cut and frozen. Should your team be doing cherry-picks or backmerges when this need arises? It depends. Read our deep-dive into the pros and cons of both, then come back here for one final short scroll to the end of this newsletter.
Runway featured feature
Our Rollouts feature pulls together critical measures of release health from across your tools (like Datadog, Sentry, Amplitude, etc) and can automate rollouts — halting or accelerating —based on thresholds you define. What does this feature look like? Like this:
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Well, we've reached the end of this month's Flight Deck, but that doesn't mean we're done thinking about mobile software development blog posts. We'd love to hear if you've recently read a great post that you feel should be shared with more people. Just reply to this email and send us a link.
Otherwise, see you later in September. Unless you unsubscribe, in which case we won't be seeing you at all.
