For a long time, I was a professional musician. While that means being good at riding buses and airplanes and biding my time until someone counts off a song, it also means dealing with a large volume of songs to learn. To help with that part, I wrote a macOS (then OSX) application called SongTool, which allowed me to loop parts of songs on-the-fly, adjust the speed and pitch, and build playlists. Some of my musician friends started using it and I released an iOS version in 2015. SongTool was in the iOS App Store until 2020, when I removed it (Apple Music conspired against me). I also released a simple music calculator called DelayTool, which is still available in the App Store.
The release of SongTool led to a job offer and a new career. I started working at a gaming house in 2015, followed by a stint at a local agency. In 2016, I became a partner at East Five LLC, a decidedly low-key full-stack consultancy, with clients in the healthcare, B2B, B2C, and music spaces. From 2016 to 2022, I built prototypes and finished apps, delved into new technologies, worked with product owners and other teams, and even took care of the accounting. It has been quite an education in development and in how that development translates into business decisions.
I have far-ranging experience developing iOS applications from concept to distribution. I value well-structured, direct, expressive code and strive to create modern, maintainable codebases. I thoroughly enjoy diving into new ideas and sharing knowledge with others. I am opinionated about technologies and approaches, but really try not to be dogmatic. In the end, however, my overriding goal is to deliver a user experience that is delightful and intuitive.
I have worked extensively in UIKit and SwiftUI, and have used Core Data, Core Audio, Combine, Structured Concurrency, and numerous other Apple technologies. I have interfaced with REST, Firebase and Apollo GraphQL APIs and am the author of an open-source set of Combine publishers for Apollo’s iOS client, fittingly called ApolloCombine.
In 2022, East Five was acquired by one of our clients and after taking some time off, I decided to start my own development company, Black Bar Labs. I look forward to working with old and new clients to create innovative iOS apps. I really love what I do and programming scratches the same itch that music did for so many years. Some people don’t understand how those two things can be related, but if you know, you know.