#9: Last newsletter of 2024!

I skipped the newsletter last week because I was on the Christmas holiday 🎄. But I’m back this week with the last newsletter of 2024.
2024 was not quite a great year for me, but at least I’ve learned something. In 2025, I promise to try my best to make it the best year ever! I hope you have a great holiday and are ready for the new year.

Great articles this week

1. Overview of Mobile E2E Testing

E2E testing is a critical part of the software development process, and big tech companies have applied it. It helps ensure the application works as expected from the user’s perspective.
This is a detailed article about the overview of Mobile E2E Testing. The article covers the following topics:

What is E2E Testing?
Comparison of different E2E Testing frameworks
Client-Server Testing vs. Server-Side Testing
Challenges of E2E Testing
Common Practices for E2E Testing

Note: I want to shout out to the author of the article, Trinh Ngoc Thuyen, for the great content. His blog is a great resource for software engineers.

In this article, the author reminds us about the importance of security in the software development process. She also shares some of the practices that we can apply to improve the security of our applications.

3. XCTest Meets @MainActor: How to Fix Strict Concurrency Warnings

When integrate XCTest with the new concurrency model, we may face some issues with the @MainActor attribute. The easy way to fix is adding the @MainActor attribute to the test method.
This article explains in detail the root cause of the issue, and how we can fix it the proper way.

4. Swift 6 upgrade Preparation

To prepare for the Swift 6 upgrade, we need to make sure our codebase is ready for the new changes. This is the step-by-step resources to help you prepare for the Swift 6 upgrade for your project.

5. How we think about Threads’ iOS performance

A great article from Facebook Engineering about how they ensure app performance in Thread iOS app. Not only tracking closely some metrics like lauch time, app size, disk storage, … they also introduce business feature to make user experience better. For example, they introduced the “Draft” feature to help users save their work in case of app crash, or showing the UI ealier to make user feels that the app is fast.
This is an eye-opening article for me. Tech problems can also be solved by business features 🤩

6. How Notion Builds Their iOS and Android Apps

A video from Notion about how they build their iOS and Android apps. I was surprised that their team size is only 11 engineers, but they can developed such a complex app that has 100M+ users.
In the video, you will learn:

Why they decided to move from cross-platform to native app, and how they measure the success of the decision along the way
Tech stack of Notion
Engineering process: Code review, meetings, release process, …
Advice for junior engineers

7. Eye Exercise

Just a reminder that we should take care of our eyes 👀. This is a 5 minutes eye exercise video that I found on YouTube. I hope you will find it helpful ❤️