Collaboration and learning are at the core of Lumosity’s company culture. To that end, we’ve launched a monthly Tech Talks series at our office in San Francisco to explore new topics, learn best practices, share what we’ve learned over the years, and meet like-minded people.
For our first Tech Talk, Michele Titolo, iOS Developer at Reddit, and CTO of Women Who Code, gave a talk on “Scaling within iOS.”
Her tips for scaling an app included:
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Don’t be a roadblock. Be agile and aware of what others on your team are working on.
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Know your tools. Understand how best to use the tools available to you and be aware of their limitations.
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Communication is key. Work with your team to split up the work so that collisions can be prevented. Also, although no one likes meetings, getting together and getting talking done up front helps to effectively break up work among the team.
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Document your code. Code documentation lives forever. Within your documentation, make note of hidden dependencies and track everything.
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Be defensive in your code. Code review is important for spotting and recovering from non-fatal errors. Make sure you can track and address crashes through your tools.
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Prepare your servers to scale. Consider how things will go if your app goes viral, and make sure you are using services that have long-term cost and scale viability. Take into account global traffic.
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Prepare your app for anomalies. Be aware of how your application will behave if your servers are unreachable, and how this is different from offline mode. Always have Plan B for when things go wrong.
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Listen to customer feedback. Users are really great at identifying bugs - use that to your advantage and continually listen to them.
Interested in joining us for future Tech Talks? Please sign up here!
If you have any suggestions for future Tech Talks, would like to submit a proposal to speak at upcoming Tech Talks, or would like to connect, please contact us at techtalks@lumosity.com.