👋 I’m Christian.

I make iOS and Mac apps in San Francisco. I'm particularly good at launching products, and mostly work with early-stage startups. I’ve led engineering teams, managed products, and even designed stuff too.

I'm available for consulting. Contact me to get help building an iOS app or Mac app, or prototyping your product.

Selected Work

Cotap for iOS and Android

Cotap is mobile messaging for business. I built the Cotap iOS app from the ground up. After that, I built the Android app too.

From there I became director of the Android team, and was later promoted to Product Manager.
TrackerBot [Acquired]

I independently conceived, designed, and developed an iOS app for Pivotal Tracker, called TrackerBot. It quickly became the most popular app for Tracker, and was subsequently acquired by Pivotal Labs.
LinkedIn Events

Together with a great product team, I launched LinkedIn Events. Since we were featured on the homepage, we had to scale from 0 to millions of users overnight.
Squeal

A Swift wrapper for SQLite that I built in my spare time. It’s focused on giving developers direct access to SQL when building Swift apps.

Recent Posts

Jun 16 2016
Testing Web Apps from End-to-End in Go

When I started my first Go project last fall – a web service backed by PostgreSQL – getting a test suite setup was my first priority. Since I had no clue how to write Go, I figured tests would be the best way to tell whether my code worked.

Setting up a full integration test suite, running against a local test database, ended up being a big project in itself. Frameworks like Rails provide this out of the box, but the Go community eschews monolithic frameworks and embraces small, focused libraries. I've grown to appreciate that a lot, but it created a much steeper learning curve.

This post shares how I write end-to-end integration tests in Go, with very little code. My tests run against a local PostgreSQL server, and make real HTTP calls to ensure that my services work as a whole.

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May 19 2016
The Private Lives of Emoji

I recently posted about the Emoji regular expressions I wrote in Swift. While writing that library, I got to know a lot about how Emoji work. Here’s a tell-all guide to what Emoji are like under the hood! 😳

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May 17 2016
Emoji Regular Expressions in Swift

A recent Swift project required detecting emoji characters in various bits of text. This is becoming pretty common — everybody ❤️ emoji!

It was a huge pain in the ass. Emoji are much trickier to work with than “normal” characters since they use all kinds of Unicode Voodoo. I kept thinking, “WHY ISN’T THERE JUST A TABLE-FLIPPIN’ REGULAR EXPRESSION FOR EMOJI!?!?”

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Apr 6 2013
ARC Doesn't Clean Up After an Exception

I recently discovered that ARC does not clean up objects automatically when an exception is thrown, which was the cause of some strange test pollution in my specs.

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Aug 25 2012
You don’t need to copy Apple to create something great. Remember Web OS?

Marco Arment posted a more upbeat reaction to the Apple-Samsung decision handed down yesterday, in response to Andy Ithnako’s more pessimistic take:

I disagree that “useful” phones need to be so close to the iPhone that they run into Apple’s patents and trade-dress claims in the Samsung case.

I completely agree, and he goes on to name-check Windows 8 as a mobile interface that is useful without copying the iPhone.

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May 10 2012
NSIndexSet block enumeration gotcha

If you use NSIndexSet’s block enumerators in your iOS or Mac app code, you should beware of a bug I’ve encountered when using [NSIndexSet enumerateIndexesInRange:options:block:].

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