Nick Jones

iOS Developer

Projects

Work Experience

I definitely wouldn't expect anyone to read all of this! But feel free to take a look at and have a read through any part you may be particularly interested in.

Alternatively if you want to know more about anything here or ask any other questions please feel free to reach out on LinkedIn

I also have a number of personal projects I'm either working on or have finished which you can check out on my personal projects page


Deliveroo


Nov 2023 - Present

At Deliveroo I work currently within the Loyalty team where we focus on building out and tightening the different Deliveroo Plus subscription offerings that we have. I joined the team as we were kicking off the brand new Diamond subscription tier project; the first Deliveroo have added in years.

The project required both updates to the entire existing flow of the app as well as brand new features such as allowing customers to earn and spend the credits that they’d earned, adding support for Apple Pay for our subscriptions, recreating the subscription screen from the ground up and more.

Throughout the project I’ve made changes and been involved in all of the areas that were impacted but my main focus was around our new credit back / cashback offering in which, from the iOS side of things, I led the project from inception to completion.


PhotoBox


Jun 2020 - Apr 2023

I joined PhotoBox just after the very first release of their new iOS app. The app was being rebuilt from the ground up in order to bring it up to date with modern standards and so, as a team, our job was to not only implement a brand new design into the more read-only or "shop-window" parts of the app such as the product and shop pages but also add support for the company's many products into the interactive in-app editor.

As an early member of the team I was responsible for the development of a number of crucial parts of the app. One area in particular early on being the payment flow which I helped to not only speed up and redesign but to also add Apple Pay support where there was none before, something which we saw a huge uptake of almost instantly after releasing. As part of the payment's work I also championed making use of the Lottie animation framework to improve the feel of the app especially when loading times were unavoidable.

With lots of potential available with the nature of the app and with it being in its infancy there was lots of room for innovation. My first personal addition to the app was creating a feature for the canvas wall art products to allow customers to view what they'd created in our editor on an interactive 3D canvas with the option to preview the product with AR.

Outside of new feature innovations I also designed and pushed for user-centric improvements and additions to new features such as the creation of an interactive tutorial for a new "Magic Pages" feature.

The tutorial made use of Video Game practices of a show and try guidance system where the user is first automatically shown how the feature should work as shown in the below gif

Magic Pages Tutotial Screen

The first "automatic" part of the tutorial

And is then guided through shifting UI elements to use the feature themselves as you can also see in the below gif where the user is first guided to the left hand image through an animation and once they've picked up their image are then guided to the destination of the their draggable image

Magic Pages Tutotial Screen

The second "guided" part of the tutorial

Through this combination of show and try our user's were easily able to learn and use a new and powerful but potentially hard to pick up feature


Premier Inn


Oct 2017 - Jun 2020

Joining Premier Inn Digital was the first time I finally got to work as part of a full iOS development team; something I'd been wanting for years but hadn't had the luxury of when working in early-stage startups. Having people to discuss problems and ideas with has been incredible and being able to work in a fully fleshed out Scrum environment has made a huge difference in being able to focus on one problem at a time, something I wish I had always had.

Due to an ever increasingly complex and large codebase a few months after joining we went through the process of evaluating VIPER as a replacement architecture for our current MVC implementation. After a number of test runs we took the decision to fully migrate to VIPER and over the last year we have, bar a few small screens, successfully done so. To make the process of migration easier I created a number of scripts and eventually Xcode templates to automatically generate blank “modules” complete with the necessary boilerplate code for those modules.

Going from startups to a large company there was certainly some eye-openers in terms of release freezes, sign-offs etc. But exposure to both of these worlds has, I believe, given me a good understanding of both such as where the two crossover, where the weaknesses of each lie, what the benefits of both are and most importantly where both can benefit from the ways of working of one another.


SimbaPay


Feb 2016 - Oct 2017

When I took over the development of SimbaPay's iOS app my first decision was to start the process of updating the existing codebase from Objective C to Swift. By ensuring all future features from the time of me joining the company were written in Swift and iteratively rewriting and refactoring a number of classes with each release the codebase became predominantly Swift based. Before the process began the codebase was purely Objective C.

In addition to ensuring that the code continued to be updated and improved I also introduced continuous integration to the development cycle using BuddyBuild which drastically increased the speed at which new versions were tested and deployed.

Taking on the sole development of a financial app such as SimbaPay was challenging but hugely beneficial. The sensitive nature of monetary transactions meant that features and code rewrites that I made always needed to be thought out in depth and the implementation of these features incredibly accurate.

Outside of the technical aspects of the job I also represented the company for a presentation at the Kenyan embassy in Paris when we were looking to expand into France.

In our funding phase we were invited to an incubator in Cape Town with Barclays during which we completely redesigned the money transfer flow in the app and I had to concatonate our existing 5 screens into a single all-encompassing screen in a week in time for our presentation to potential investors.


ReadBug


July 2015 - Feb 2016

ReadBug was my first real devloper role and as the only iOS developer on the team having to figure everything out myself meant I learnt a huge amount and massively accelerated my understanding of not just iOS development but the entire stack which in turn I believe has allowed me to develop mobile applications much more efficiently.

During my time at the company I brought a number of good engineering practices to Readbug such as applying the lean methodology which helped us to learn more, faster and also introducing the idea of stand ups to allow everyone to gain a clearer context of the day ahead across the different teams.

When I arrived at ReadBug the entire app was written in Objective C, something I had next to no experience with as I'd started my mobile development path on the release of Swift. Writing all of the new features in Swift whilst also having to connect all of the existing codebase through a bridging header file whilst at the same time needing to learn Obejctive C's syntax and quirks was a unique challenge. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone but in the end I do think it made me a better developer.