About

I’m Robin: a software engineer who’s been building iOS apps in Swift since 2016 and Swift 3.

Most recently I was at Veed, working on real-time video editing; first fully natively, and then with React and a WebKit wrapper. I even got to write a bespoke UITextInput implementation for editing captions at one point (complete with some shiny multi-cursor support). Together with some architectural rework, it made whole categories of long-standing bugs structurally impossible. When I found myself dropped in at the deep end of a React codebase, I still had a lot of fun. I moved the rendering layer from run-loop-driven to reactive, and fixed a few gnarly bugs that were pinning the web engine’s recompositing to the display refresh rate. That cut combined GPU and CPU power impact by 138x while paused (really), with a healthy 26% off during playback too.

Before Veed I led an iOS team at Sky Betting and Gaming, did fintech at Tymit, shipped commercial apps at Netsells, and started out doing DevOps at Trimble/Tekla.

I’m happiest at either end of the stack: leaning on Swift’s type system until the bad states can’t be written down at all (dismantling a god object or two on the way), or sitting with Instruments until the milliseconds stop appearing. I’m always up for pairing, mentoring, and arguing about trade-offs in the open too; the codebase tends to follow how the team feels about it.

This blog is where I write stuff: Swift or whatever I’ve been tinkering with. Say hello.