Twitch Live Dashboard Out Now on Mobile

18 Jan 2018

Twitch streamers rejoice! You can now manage your channel right on your iOS or Android device with the new live dashboard.

I was lucky enough to both manage the delivery of this feature on iOS and Android and also implement it on iOS. As I toy with the idea of switching into management I’m lucky enough to have a manager who’s giving me opportunities to drive projects to get a taste of what it’s like to be a manager.

As for iOS development, my feelings on it haven’t changed to much since I last did some serious iOS work at Evernote in November 2016. I’m sad to report Xcode and the iOS ecosystem hasn’t improved much in the past year. Objective-C and Swift interoperability is painful especially if you’re used to the buttery smooth Java-Kotlin interoperability. I also had weird compiler errors that were fixed not by the standard “delete Derived Data and try again” but by restarting Xcode!

The iOS ecosystem pain points aside, it was nice (and very stimulating) to work on a completely different codebase with a different set of Twitch team members. Because Swift is like Kotlin, I coded all of the dashboard feature in Swift. 😏 I’m blessed to have awesome coworkers who quickly powered me up many levels on the Swift front.

I hope everyone enjoys the new live dashboard. It was a blast to build it!

P.S. Interface Builder and AutoLayout are terrible compared to Android XML layout files. LinearLayouts FTW!