Hi, I'm Sam.

I’ve been working as an iOS developer since 2013 — back when iOS 6 was still around and ARC still felt like magic. Since then, most of my career has been spent on platform and core teams, focusing less on individual screens and more on the foundations that make large apps sustainable: architecture, shared abstractions, design systems, and developer experience.

I currently work as a Senior iOS Engineer and tech-lead IC at Compass, where I contribute to mobile platform initiatives around architecture, tooling, and design systems. Before that, I worked on the Mobile Platform team at Ring (Amazon) and on the architecture team at MercadoLibre, helping build and maintain systems used by large teams and apps at scale. A big part of my work has always been building SDKs, internal tools, and CI/CD workflows that other developers rely on every day.

This blog is a place where I write about things I care about as an engineer.

Over the years, I’ve learned (sometimes the hard way) that understanding why something exists makes the how easier to reason about — especially in large, long-lived codebases. You can memorize APIs, but systems only really make sense once you understand the problems they’re trying to solve.

Some posts here are reflective and conceptual. Others are very practical, focusing on concrete implementations, trade-offs, patterns, and tools I use day to day. Many of them come from real projects, real constraints, and real mistakes — or from things that finally “clicked” after years of using them without fully understanding them.

I’m a native Spanish speaker from Uruguay, so if my English sometimes sounds a bit different, that’s why. I aim for clarity over cleverness, and simplicity over buzzwords.

If something here helps you think a bit more clearly about a technical decision you’re facing, then this blog is doing its job.