Mowyty is live 🥳

We did it! Mowyty – an app that will help Ukrainians to start their new life in Poland just landed on Google Play (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mowyty.app) and App Store (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mowyty/id1622156106) 🎉

Mowyty in numbers so far:
– 11 months since the first push in a git repository,
– 16 people worked on Mowyty so far,
– 1 burnout that I had on the way,
– 2 platforms: Android and iOS,
– 1 codebase: Flutter,
– 23 followers on our Instagram profile so far (https://www.instagram.com/mowytyapp).

Mowyty wouldn’t be live now without help and hard work of everyone who contributed with their development, design, translation, legal, marketing and other services. Special thanks to the PettersonApps and Perpetio teams and my friend Ula – I’m sure that without your help and support I would give up on this idea a few months ago 🙂

It is just a beginning of course. We want to listen to feedback from our users and keep improving the product. If you have any Ukrainian friends for whom the app may be useful please share the links with them 🙂

New product announcement – Mowyty

I strongly believe that a technology doesn’t exist for itself. It does exist to make our life easier, more efficient and more enjoyable. It exists to help us. I’m working on an app that will help Ukrainians who either live in Poland or want to move there in the future. I’m working on the first in a Polish market, Ukrainian user friendly, one-language app that will let them learn Polish in their native language, not in English as it’s already possible in a few language learning apps. The app is called Mowyty. Why Mowyty? Mowyty means “speak” in Ukrainian but it’s easily understandable for Polish people as well.

There is an official Mowyty website live already, please check it out here: https://mowyty.com. Please sign up for a Newsletter to be notified once the app is available. It would be great if you could share it with your Ukrainian friends and colleagues too of course, thanks! 🙏 Speaking of the app’s availability, there will be 2 versions of the app available: for the iOS and Android platforms. I’m aiming to release the iOS one by the end of June 2022 and the Android one by the end of 2022.

What will Mowyty give you?

  • possibility to learn the most useful Polish words and phrases from 12 categories,
  • 3 levels in each category, you will start with the basics and get to the more interesting vocabulary later,
  • 2 modes: learn and test, first you learn the phrases and then you can check your knowledge,
  • 2 types of tests: question-answers one and a memory game,
  • Mowyty Pro – additionally, you get the exercise sheets in a Pro version of the app! 

It is the first time when I’m hiring an external agency to help me with building my product. Big thanks to Perpetio company from Lviv, Ukraine! Thanks for all your engagement, ideas and a great cooperation 🙂 I would also like to thank my friend Ula. Ula is Ukrainian, lives in Poland and is a Polish teacher (you can check her YouTube channel here https://www.youtube.com/c/PolishglotsUA) so she is the best possible source of feedback for Mowyty. Thanks for all your help, Ula! 🙂

iOS Developer — preparing for a recruitment process, part 3: technical interview

This is the third article from my “iOS Developer — preparing for a recruitment process” series. You can read the previous articles here:

iOS Developer — preparing for a recruitment process, part 1: CV

iOS Developer — preparing for a recruitment process, part 2: technical screening

In this part, I’m going to cover a technical interview where you are asked the iOS specific questions. This interview is usually led by an iOS dev (or more than one) from a company that you applied to. I think a good approach and an attitude is not to take it as a test of your knowledge, don’t think that the second side wants you to fail or to find your iOS weaknesses. Try to think about your interviewers as the colleagues from your future team, you are just going to solve some programming problems together, as you do every day as an iOS developer 🙂

There are different types of the questions you may be asked during this stage of a recruitment process. Expectations in terms of your answers may differ based on your seniority level of course. Junior developers may be required to have a general idea about some concepts, whereas the senior ones should definitely have more in depth knowledge and know pros and cons of the solutions they go for.

Some of the most popular topics from the iOS world that you might be asked about are:

  • algorithms,
  • data structures,
  • memory management (Swift, Objective-C),
  • performing network requests,
  • class vs struct,
  • Autolayout,
  • design patterns,
  • SOLID,
  • polymorphism,
  • multithreading,
  • automated testing (unit, UI, snapshot tests, TDD).

Usually a technical interview consists of 2 parts: theoretical and practical one. In the second one you may be given some algorithm or data structure related programming challenges to solve or some companies prefer to give a sample iOS project with a table view or a collection view with a navigation to a details screen and you will need to fix some simple bugs, add some small functionality and / or potentially write unit tests. Pro tip: interviewers like seeing candidates following a TDD approach so make sure you try to write tests before an actual implementation.

There is one important thing about a practical part — your solution doesn’t need to be super efficient and super clean at the beginning. Try to come up with something that works first. Even if there won’t be any time to optimise it later, it will be a big plus for you as a candidate if you will be able to explain what your next steps in terms of an implementation and optimisation would be. Your interviewers completely understand that a time for your task is limited, they rather want to see how you think, how you approach solving problems.

One more tip: it’s really acceptable to say “I don’t know” if you don’t know something. No one knows everything about iOS, most of us need to use Google or Stack Overflow sometimes or just seek help from the colleagues from the team.

That’s all what I wanted to cover in this part of the series 🙂 I hope some of you will find it at least a bit useful. Please let me know what you think about this article, share your feedback by DMing me on Twitter: @dmarkowski_. In the next article I will write about the last stage of a recruitment process: company culture fit + soft skills + team lead interviews. I’m aiming to publish it in 1–2 weeks 🙂 See you then 👋

tournamentsheets.com reactivation

As you may know I have a DM Table Tennis app. A few months ago an idea of excluding a Tournament sheets part of the app to a website came to my mind. So I purchased a www.tournamentsheets.com domain and built a simple website offering the tournament sheets (in PDF files) to download for free.

There were the following sheets available:

  • 8 players – single elimination,
  • 8 players – double elimination,
  • 16 players – single elimination,
  • 16 players – double elimination,
  • 32 players – single elimination,
  • 32 players – double elimination,
  • 64 players – single elimination,
  • 64 players – double elimination,
  • 128 players – single elimination,
  • 128 players – double elimination,
  • 3 players – round-robin,
  • 4 players – round-robin,
  • 5 players – round-robin,
  • 6 players – round-robin.

Everything was fine, tournamentsheets.com was up and running for some time but I analysed my spendings and I wanted to optimise them. One of the actions that I decided to take was to decrease a number of web domains that I own. I thought that the best approach will be to keep my landing pages and web products under my main damianmarkowski.com domain.

My first step to slowly kill Tournament sheets project was moving it to damianmarkowski.com/tournamentsheets and not to renew the tournamentsheets.com domain anymore. The next planned step was to remove damianmarkowski.com/tournamentsheets entirely.

I didn’t do that though. Why? I kept seeing there is still some traffic coming to that website, even without me advertising or tweeting about it so I decided to give it the second chance.

Second life for tournamentsheets.com

So I’m moving back to tournamentsheets.com. I’m going to re-organise the website and the project’s business model. I will be offering tournament sheets on Gumroad for a small fee. I will re-build the website in the upcoming weeks and I should be able to start selling the sheets in the second half of May 2021.

iOS Developer — preparing for a recruitment process, part 2: technical screening

This is the second article from my “iOS Developer — preparing for a recruitment process” series. You can read the first one about writing a good CV here:

iOS Developer — preparing for a recruitment process, part 1: CV

In this part, I’m going to cover the first stage of a recruitment process which is a technical screening. It’s usually a short (20–50 mins) call with a recruiter from a company that you applied to or a recruiter from some agency working for that company.

During that short call you are going to talk about the following topics:

  • recruiter and company introduction,
  • your introduction,
  • your CV walkthrough,
  • your motivation for applying to that company,
  • your questions.

Recruiter and company introduction

At the very beginning a recruiter will introduce themselves and a company / position they are recruiting for. Remember to do your own research beforehand anyway. You will get to know how the recruitment process in that company looks like, how many stages there are etc.

Your introduction

You will be asked to quickly introduce yourself. Your answer shouldn’t be very long and detailed at this point. I recommend to say that you are an iOS developer, you’ve been programming for X years, using Swift and / or Objective-C programming languages, you can mention your experience with other platforms (backend or Android for example) as well and at the end I would say what company you work at currently and what your role is.

Your CV walkthrough

You will have an opportunity to go a bit more in depth in terms of your experience and career so far. Try to highlight the most interesting technical challenges that you have faced at each of the previous companies (and at the current one too of course) but also remember to choose the most relevant ones for the position you applied for.

Your motivation for applying to that company

This is a very important question. The first one from a “company culture fit” series. There will be another recruitment process stage dedicated to this topic later, where you will be asked more questions checking if your personality matches what they company is looking for. There is no one-fits-all answer to this question. Try to show that you share company’s values, that money is not the most important factor for you while looking for a job. There is always someone who will be willing to pay more than your current company. If that is your main focus, that means you will easily leave the company even in a few months which is a red flag for a recruiter 🙂

Your questions

This part is usually left for the end of a technical screening but it doesn’t mean it’s the least important one. It is actually important. Asking questions about a role and a company shows your interest, your excitement, that you are really interested in that position. I remember myself looking for the first job some years ago and answering that question “No, thank you, I think I have no questions at this point.”. I know how wrong that was now, after 8 years, and it was definitely a red flag for the companies back then.

That’s it for this part of my “iOS Developer — preparing for a recruitment process” series 🙂 I hope you learnt something new while reading it. I will publish the next part about a technical interview, including a list of the iOS topics that you may be asked about (all iOS developer levels, from Junior to Senior) in more or less a week.

If you liked this article and the series in general and would like to be updated once I publish the new articles, feel free to follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/dmarkowski_ and add my blog https://damianmarkowski.com/blog/ to your bookmarks. See you next time 👋

iOS Developer – preparing for a recruitment process, part 1: CV

We all know that preparing for an interview in a tech industry is not easy. There are so many things that you can be asked about, regardless if you are an Android, iOS, backend or web frontend developer.

I have decided to write a short series of articles, explaining — based on my experience and knowledge — how to prepare for a recruitment process as an iOS Developer. Even though one of the next articles will be focused on the technical iOS development related questions that you may be asked, some of the content in this series will be useful for the other developers as well.

This is the first article in this series and it’s gonna cover preparing a good CV.

Let me just set the expectations straight from the very beginning — I’m not going to provide any CV template in this article. Instead, I will try to give you some advices that will help you to prepare a successful CV.

In my opinion, there are two types of CVs, or in other words — two groups of developers that need to create their CV: 1) junior developers or people aspiring to be developers (without a professional experience yet) and 2) experienced developers (applying for regular / senior positions).

CV for inexperienced / junior developers

If you are in this group, don’t worry, all developers had to start somewhere, we all have been there. I think it might be helpful for you to consider the following suggestions while creating your CV:

  • It’s ok not to have any professional experience at the beginning. Feel free to add GitHub, App Store links to your personal projects and apps. It shows that you like trying and finishing projects. It also shows that you’ve run through the whole process of releasing an app to the App Store, that means a lot.
  • Contributing to open source projects counts as well, actually it’s really beneficial to mention that.
  • It’s also a good idea to mention all the courses or certificates that you have completed. They don’t need to be directly related to an iOS development. For example if you are applying for a job in Sweden as a foreigner, it will be much appreciated if you have done a Swedish language course.
  • Because you don’t have any professional experience yet or it’s just one company, it might be worth adding an information about being a part of some students’ organisations or some local communities. That positions you as a potential leader, passionate developer, someone doing “something more” than a minimum required daily work.

CV for experienced developers (applying for regular / senior positions)

If you are in this group, try to choose only the most relevant experience and skills to the position that you are applying for. I’m sure you could have a nice 5-page long CV with all the projects, companies that you’ve worked for, all responsibilities described in a detailed way but a sad reality is that…. the recruiters won’t have time to read all of that. Try to focus on the following suggestions:

  • Recruiters like numbers while reading about your experience. Make sure you use them while shortly describing how you contributed to your teams’ successes. Bullet point lists and numbered lists work better than a plain English descriptions.
  • Include only the most relevant experience, information about frameworks that you’ve used, programming languages, projects. It should be as relevant as possible to the job position you are applying for.
  • You probably don’t want to use a lot of space in your CV for your hobbies or non-job related things. Recruiters are looking for as many proofs as possible that you are worth that higher rate for a more senior position.

Bonus 🥳

I mentioned at the beginning of this article that I’m not gonna include any templates for a CV but that’s not entirely true actually…. I would like to share with you a nice tool that I find really useful for creating CVs. It’s https://www.overleaf.com/. It’s a LaTeX based platform. They have some templates to create a CV as well. Check them out!

And this is the end of the first article in this series. In the next one I will write about preparing for the first stage of the recruitment process: a technical screening.

If you liked this article and would like to be updated when I post a new one, feel free to follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dmarkowski_. See you next time! 👋

Visit all the permanently inhabited continents in Postcardful

Version 1.5 of Postcardful is live in the App Store 🥳 I promised in one of my recent tweets (https://twitter.com/dammarpol/status/1368649813462556672) to publish it on Saturday, the 13th March, exactly 1 year after we started working from home because of the coronavirus but since I’m an impatient person and Apple approved the update quite quickly, I decided to click the Release button earlier 😀

What’s new in version 1.5? 

  • 🌍 you can travel through all the permanently inhabited continents now! A background of your journey changes respectively to a continent which you are visiting at a given time,
  • ✈️ speed of the planes changes as you progress to the next continents, the more you travel the more difficult is to avoid them!

You say all the permanently inhabited continents but in what order?

The order was set based on a number of the countries in every continent, starting with a continent with the lowest number of countries so you will visit all the continents in the following order:

  • South America,
  • Australia and Oceania,
  • North America,
  • Europe,
  • Asia,
  • Africa.