Emerge's Bits & Bytes: November 2023

It's been quite a month of travel for the Emerge team (no private UFO yet). We met devs at Droidcon London, visited Bumble's offices, and learned from the Duolingo Owl in Pittsburgh 🦉.

Emerge @ Droidcon London

This month, the Emerge team will travel to Buenos Aires, Argentina, for Swiftable. Our co-founder Noah Martin will speak about how the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence ties into programming 👽, and Itay Brenner will run a workshop on Continuous Performance and Quality Monitoring.

What we're building

You can now preview every image in your app from Emerge's X-Ray. For an app like NASA, you can see cool pics like a map of every planet.

For FanDuel, it helps you easily see the images in your app that are being duplicated.

Android's Size Analysis is now significantly more granular. Class breakdowns allow you to attribute size directly to classes in your codebase, rather than higher-level packages. This improvement is the foundation for exciting new features that will be released soon.

To illustrate, here’s a comparison of a TikTok package breakdown before the update vs. after the update.

We released two big features in our open-source SnapshotPreviews-iOS.

Accessibility Audits bring the power of Xcode 15's performAccessibilityAudit() to every preview in your app without the need to actually write the test. If you're not familiar with Xcode's accessibility audits, here's a great guide from Pol Piella.

Preview Gallery is an interactive UI for all the previews in your app. You can create an interface to browse and use any component - great for sharing how components actually render with your product & design team (think Showkase for iOS). The Handshake iOS team used this feature to delete almost 2k lines of code from their repo 🤯.

Preview Gallery of different Swift components

What we're writing

Written by our friends at Spotify, this post defines the different types of app size, why it’s important, and how they manage app size with the help of Emerge Tools.

What we're reading

Near and dear to our hearts, Meta describes their Systematic Code and Asset Removal Framework (SCARF) to identify and eliminate dead code.

Dive into the wonders of managing virtual cores in macOS Sonoma on Apple silicon.

Written 5 years ago, but showed up on the front page of HN this past month. Many of the complaints about modern software development resonate with our team and illustrate why we build the products we do.

A related TL;DR - "what the f@#k just happened? What the f@#k is this s!%t?"

Full disclosure: this is click-bait, but it's worth the 2 minutes it takes to read and share.

Dogs of Emerge

This is Scooby, whose long hair and penchant for pool makes it tough to get a photo of the Emerge tag. Scooby is the owner of Emerge's CEO, Josh.

And in very exciting news, Emerge welcomes Nico Hinderling to our team, welcome aboard Nico!!! You can see our open positions on the Emerge careers page.

Hope you enjoyed these bits and bytes!