I'm excited to share that Building Mobile Apps at Scale: 39 Engineering Challenges is out. It's my first-ever paperback book and one that is free as a PDF for the rest of the month[1].<p>I had worked for years at Uber, first as a mobile engineer, then an engineering manager. Despite being a mobile-first company, I could not shake the feeling that non-mobile engineers and managers consistently underestimated the complexity of large-scale mobile development. I've been in so many meetings where an engineer, a PM, or a director would say, "oh, compared to the backend, the mobile part should be simple enough... it's just another frontend, right?".<p>I found myself explaining again and again to PMs, engineers, and stakeholders all the hoops the mobile team needs to jump to ship things in production. How mistakes are very expensive - and thus, we need to ship almost all changes behind feature flags. How the build train means that the changes we make today will take at least 2 weeks to get to prod. How devices being offline is something we need to actively support, and anticipate... and so on. I noticed similar "aha moments" each time. Talking with other mobile engineers in similar environments, they were having similar conversations, and battling similar assumptions on mobile being relatively simple.<p>I had been collecting the numerous challenging areas that I planned to publish as a blog post. After I shared the draft on Twitter[2], I got an unexpected amount of interest in people offering to contribute. The contents became too long for a post, and so this book was born. Several people asked for a paperback version[3], and I decided to create the book in print as well, as I felt the contents warranted it.<p>I hope you find this book useful - both if you're a mobile engineer or if you work with mobile teams. And I'd love to hear any feedback!<p>[1] <a href="https://www.mobileatscale.com/#pricing" rel="nofollow">https://www.mobileatscale.com/#pricing</a><p>[2] <a href="https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1335305213394251780" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1335305213394251780</a><p>[3] <a href="https://twitter.com/elevenetc/status/1335595203411972097" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/elevenetc/status/1335595203411972097</a>
Having read the book cover to cover I can say that it is quite a well made, relatable list of challenges and how they are being resolved in the sector. Foreseeing these types of issues is hard especially if you never went through the process, and quite hairy to resolve as such I believe it is a very good resource to have.<p>On another note each section comes with quite a lengthy follow up material, which I found absolutely amazing to use as a starting point as well.<p>Absolutely love it!
Everything Gergely writes (and he writes a lot! Books, blogs, tweets; and also YT channel) is gold, especially if you're into mobile dev, interested in growing as a senior developer, or if you live in Europe and are interested by big tech. He's really filling a huge gap.<p>Re:book, I've been an Android dev for 3 years (hybrid & native) and the book really covers the whole spectrum of things (as you can see in the table of contents) that need to be done to have a good app, some of them hard to know in advance. At the same time, it can (and should) be read and understood by non-devs (project managers, directors etc.). Congrats on the launch!
Congratulations on publishing! And on a unique topic at that.<p>I’ve built, and than managed teams building, apps of large scale and complexity. Your outline looks like a goldmine of practical and essential advice, especially for folks just ramping up on mobile. I’m excited to give it a read.
Looks like a great book but was unable to download. Tried with more than one emails.<p>Edit: Looks like they programmed it to work only with Gmail and probably other mainstream email providers.
Congratulation on the publication. I remember meeting you in Amsterdam Uber offices for a casual chat and coffee and really enjoyed our conversation. It was pretty neat that you were willing to nerd out with a rando from US over distributed systems and payments :)
> Bugsnag have published metrics on what median app stability scores look like:<p>> 99.46% for apps built by 1-10 engineers<p>> 99.60% for apps built by 11-50 engineers<p>> 99.89% for apps built by 51-100 engineers<p>> 99.79% for apps built by 100+ engineers<p>I find it amusing that reliability goes up when the team hits 11 engineers, then again when it hits 51 engineers, but then dips when it hits 100 engineers. Need to finally read my copy of the Mythical Man Month.
It's interesting that the paper version doesn't include "Growing as a Mobile Engineer" - too much paper and/or logistical issue? Trying to decide which way to support you, congrats!
Thanks for the great work on collecting this material. There are many gems here!<p>Chapter 18. speaks about "Manual Testing". Do you have any references on how to manage test plans? These are helpful if
It's not really mobile specific, but I could not find advice in the references provided and the tooling landscape looks rather grim.
I'm thinking mobile apps are a thing of the past. But writing a book is a hell of a job. I did it once, it was hard, as hell and the everybody pirated it.