Scott Berrevoets - Engineering Culture

Why big companies are bad platform citizens

Scott Berrevoets — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0700

In the fall, when Apple releases new iPhones and major iOS versions, small/indie developers take a lot of pride in being ready for this new tech on day 1. They spend all summer learning new APIs and development tools, and integrate them in their apps so their users can …

Review your own AI-generated code

Scott Berrevoets — Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0700

Years ago, when we started to have 5+ contributors to our codebase at Lyft, we had to establish a code review process with high enough value to justify the friction it caused. However, "value" is very subjective, as not everyone cares about the same qualities of a pull request:

Catching …

All in on Interface Builder: 10 years later

Scott Berrevoets — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0800

Back in 2017, I wrote about how we used Interface Builder as our primary way of building UI at Lyft. Interestingly, Speak chose to use Interface Builder to build UI too before SwiftUI came along, though without the same tooling we had at Lyft. With Interface Builder mostly forgotten, including …

Incremental complexity in iOS development

Scott Berrevoets — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:00:00 -0800

I wrote my first app, a map to navigate my college campus, in the winter of 2011, on iOS 4.x and with Xcode 4.x. There were 25 frameworks, iOS 7 hadn't been invented yet, there was only 1 phone size, and we wrote apps with Objective-C.

But things …

Shifting the testing culture: Motivation

Scott Berrevoets — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 00:00:00 -0800

Five years ago I began promoting automated testing heavily within Lyft even though I didn't have any real experience in writing big test suites myself. Many hands make light work, so I found a few people who shared this thinking and we started on what turned out a multi-year testing …

Human factors in choosing technologies

Scott Berrevoets — Wed, 28 Sep 2022 00:00:00 -0700

I recently saw a thread where someone wanted to introduce a more capable architecture pattern than what most apps start out with in a small team, but received some pushback from teammates and was looking for help in countering their arguments.

The thread for the most part focused on the …