How many times have you explained something to someone, only to be misunderstood because you couldn't find the right words? When this happens to me I always have the same thought; *I should write about this*.\
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To me, writing is the process of shaping my understanding of something. An idea, a perspective, a story — anything rooted in thought.

I believe when you transpose your thoughts to written words, you're simultaneously reflecting on the content itself, exposing yourself to flawed thinking or gaps in understanding. This provides the opportunity to clarify, or find the right delivery.

Say someone asked you to guide them to a place. Ideally, you'd have walked the path to that place beforehand, otherwise you might get lost. In mapping it out yourself first, you may discover a faster route, or another that's simply a dead end. Regardless, you've pushed the needle of your understanding forward, which will be reflected in your guidance.\
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Now consider again the example I opened with; explaining something to someone. The same idea applies, you're much less likely to get lost if you've already explored and clarified your thoughts on the matter.

I think this is why my brain yearns to write whenever I can't find the right words;  **I want to write, so that I can communicate, so that I can be understood**. This is why I'm planning on writing more.

Why I'm Planning on Writing More

Product Engineer

A brief mention of Posture Pal for macOS, a project I worked on in 2023, in a New Yorker article about slouching.

The Truth Behind the Slouching Epidemic

Puckboard Logging

WorkLens

Dashcam Data Collection

Folio

Posture Pal for MacOS

Navi

MacWhisper

FieldDay iOS SDK

FieldDay

Today is an elegant productivity app based on a century old workflow, the Ivy Lee Method. It aims to help fight overcommitment, and answer the question "What am I doing Today?".

Today

Push Up Pal

* Worked with Air Force pilots to develop post mission paperwork iPad app, reducing mission length by at least 1 hour.

* Garnered support for feature by presenting prototype to fifty people from multiple government and civilian organizations.

* Wrote and deployed hundreds of Gherkins based UI and unit tests, expanding the project’s test coverage by 50%.

* Created data model documentation that was used as a reference by multiple teams and stakeholders during a feature sync.

iOS Engineer

* Helped design and ship the Posture Pal macOS app, culminating in an App Store feature under “Best New Apps and Updates”.

* Designed and implemented a new onboarding flow for MacWhisper, capturing 50% of the paywall conversions within the app.

Apple Platforms Engineer

* Worked with designer to implement 20+ custom interactive animations using CoreAnimation, CoreGraphics, and UIKit.

* Used Vision, AVFoundation, CoreSpotlight and CoreData to develop an intelligent and searchable image indexing system.

* Worked with team to design and develop a demo app used for vehicle data capture while driving, all within a 3 week timeline.

* Designed & implemented a new code review process, resulting in cleaner, more maintainable code & saving development hours.

Product Engineer, iOS

* Guided end-to-end development of the FieldDay iOS app, launching on the App Store within an aggressive 6-month timeframe.

* Designed a reliable, offline-proof image upload system used by the FieldDay app with 100% Gherkins based testing coverage.

* Implemented an efficient CI/CD pipeline with Xcode Cloud for beta testing, eliminating internal manual release efforts completely.

* Wrote async/await API wrappers to modernize & adapt the Apollo iOS GraphQL package so it could be used within the project.

Sam McGarry

2024