Tallan: A Mobile Experience

As part of my first series of posts about my experiences at Tallan, I'll be going over some of the first projects that I ever did after completing training, and how they shaped my development perspective.

At Tallan we do everything, and that is one of the appeals that I had going into working with the company. I thought that the amount of exposure to different technologies would allow me to try out different things, and boy did I do that. During training one of the things they mentioned was that they suggested we join a "Practice" so that we can further develop our skills in a certain area that we could master as a way to focus ourselves in the field in addition to our regular duties. The "practice" that stuck out to me the most was the "Mobile Practice" as the director, Matt Kruczek (who became my mentor), sold us on the idea of building consumer facing products that really sounded with me at the time.

And so I was able to join the exclusive club of being a member of the elite Mobile Practice, which has been the driving factor of my Tallan experience.

My First Project (Tass iOS)

The Task

The project was to rewrite the existing Tallan Internal Time and Expense Entry iOS mobile application from Objective-C to Swift.

The Challenges

  • The original developer was no longer with the company, and any form of documentation he had was not available.
  • The senior overseeing my work didn't have much experience with Swift at the time, while I didn't know either language, the framework, or the processes with Apple.
  • There was no documentation for the usage of the web services, and it was built in java code which had been built and largely untouched in ten years.
  • One request that my director asked was to refactor the data layer portion of the application to use the service/repository pattern, so it was not a one-to-one conversion.

The Approach

  1. The first thing I had to do was to understand what I was building, so in order to learn that I drew pictures of each screen into my notebook and then drew lines for different behaviors that I saw - such as what did the element do, where did it take me, and what it's purpose was.
  2. Once I had an understanding of the thing I needed to build, I started to work on the UI portion for each screen, working my way from the login screen to the time and expense entry screens. Making the necessary static connections between the screens so that I could get the flow down.
  3. Then I started to hook up various web services, using what I could gather from the existing code and integrating it with the service/repository pattern that I was tasked with designing. After a bunch of research I came back with a callback design that enabled me to propagate the behavioral patterns I needed to accomplish on the front end.
  4. Connecting the UI and the data layer came next.
  5. Finishing off the development was some cleanup tasks such as validation, some UI threading issues, and some UI adjustments.
  6. Next we were ready for alpha release, to which I had to research a bunch about how and where we would be able to deploy this app, which I later found out to be through an enterprise app.
  7. We received some quick feedback, mostly around some validation, missing business rules, and UX enhancements, but everything was working for the most part. There was an image transfer bug that intermittently occurred during some uploads that we were unable to pin down.

What I Learned

  • I learned a crap ton about iOS, Objective-C, and Swift. I had built an application from start to finish and deployed it all in one go.
  • I learned about the service/repository pattern which would guide a lot of my future designs.
  • I learned how to elicit feedback directly from my clients and work to satisfy them.
  • I learned how to step out of my comfort zone in terms of what I knew, and to research best practices and design patterns to fit my needs.
  • I learned to be a self-starter - how to create a process plan for completing a project, and to manage my own tasks.

How Can I Improve

  • Test Driven Conversion - One of the problems that I faced was that I had missed some of the business requirements during my conversion. One way around this would be to start with a test driven conversion, where I could write tests against the original code first, and then apply those tests to my new code.
  • Component-by-Component Conversion - I didn't know what you can actual intermingle Objective-C and swift in the same project. Knowing that I would have took the original project and screen by screen start replacing the necessary classes with their swift counterparts. This would have decreased the amount of variance between the existing code and my code.

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