I've been __using Android phones for a decade__ now. Low-end, mid-range, and high end too. I understand how they behave and I'm pretty used to it. I'm also a macOS user. I've got my own Macbook Pro M2 and always felt super intuitive. I love the battery, the trackpad, the gestures, the screen, and the developer friendliness.
With iOS the story is quite different, let me tell you.
## 🌧 Lowlights
Let's start with the things I don't like about iOS, and maybe why.
#### Home Screen
A lot of "Apple things" is either the way they want you to do it or no other way. The home screen is no exception to this rule. You start with 1 home screen, the possibility to add more but __you have 2 non-negotiable screens: 1 at the far left: to fill out with widgets, and 1 and the far right: the app library__.
You're probably wondering, why is this an issue. Well, if you want to remove every single widget in the first screen you'd probably imagine that screen is gone, or at least you have a setting to toggle it off. Well no, if you remove every widget it just displays an empty screen, and as far as I can tell __you can't remove it__.
And the App Library? Well, it's not that I don't like it, but __iOS arranges and groups apps by ... random weird criteria and there's no easy access to the screen__. If you have 2 home screens and you're on the far left (widget screen) you have to swipe your screen three times to get there vs the swipe up from Android to get the App Drawer.
#### Gestures
Don't get me started on gestures. I mean gestures are a good thing, I love them when they're easy to repeat, easy to remember, and useful. I remember an old Motorola moto G6 Play where you could shake the phone and get the flashlight or the camera activated, or in my Samsung S20+ where you could tap the power button twice and go straight into camera mode.
Well, I believe here Apple decided on __form over function__. Yes, you don't have the clutter of 3 buttons and the bottom of your screen, but you rely on sometimes __hard-to-execute gestures that are not even intuitive__.
If this is your first time with an iPhone, you're going to have a really hard time.
Want to see your notifications? Pull from the top! Great, like Android, or is it? It depends, if you pull from the center or far left, great, but if you pull from the right, no.
If you want to see all your open apps, pull from the bottom, but do it slowly and then reach right, because if not you end up going to the home screen.
And if you don't pull from the exact top of the screen you'll open your search.
You basically __need a full list of tutorials on how to operate this__ if you've never used one before.
#### The back button
I left this one apart from the previous gestures because it's __the most annoying to me__. In Android phones, you have a reliable way of Going back to the previous view, previous app, previous screen, home screen, closing modals, and more. And it's literally the same interface we've been seeing for the last decade on browsers, desktop OS, and more, and it's just a back arrow.
Whether you want to close the modal image view in Twitter, you want to go back to the home screen or go to the previous page in chrome, it's always, the same reliable on-screen, easy-to-reach, intuitive button.
And iOS? Well it depends, __you again have a gesture to go back__, swiping from left to right from the far center-left. But there's a catch, __it doesn't always work this way__. Instagram stories? Well, that gesture is to go to the previous story, are you on Twitter and want to see that image in more detail? Well here you have a close button on the top-right corner, are you watching a YouTube video? That gesture does nothing.
And so __it creates this lack of consistency across apps and it makes the whole experience weird and uncomfortable__.
#### Silent mode
This is going to be a short one. Do you want silent mode? __Turning the volume all the way down to zero does nothing__. And why does the iPhone have a button that you can't push on the left? Well, it's not a button, it's a switch, and it's the one in charge of silent mode. You didn't know? It seems that almost no other phone does that and the first few google suggestions for "silent mode" are all related to iPhone.
#### Other details
I'm not going to bash on other details such as customization, widgets, custom icons, or hard-to-reach settings. They're annoying, and they could be better but you have your ways around it. For the previous ones, you don't.
## ☀ Highlights
So, iOS can be annoying and super opinionated, but the hardware that comes with it, it's top-tier. Some of the apps work really really well and there are some key aspects that I truly appreciate.
#### Hardware
If I'm going to start somewhere, it has to be __the cameras__. Oh, my, freaking, god. __They're absolutely amazing__. Yes, you have phones with bigger 200MP lenses, you have one or two brands using Leica lenses, some others with 10x optical zoom, and just a few of them with better HDR. But overall experience, consistency, and quality, at least to me they're no match.
The screen is another first-class citizen and second to none. __The Super Retina XDR OLED Display with a peak brightness of 2000 nits__ (outdoors) is vibrant, ultra-responsive, bright as no other, and just delightful to use.
Lastly, the battery has a good run but it's nothing out of this world.
#### Face ID
Face recognition works better than almost every device I've ever tried. It's probably because it uses infrared sensors packed in the iPhone instead of just using light and the main camera sensor. The only thing that I don't quite like about it, is that I don't have a biometric alternative to this such as fingerprints.
#### Other details
There are a few tiny details regarding software that I like, none of them to highlight on their own.
## 🏁 Conclusion
Apple is still Apple and will continue doing the same things: whatever they want because people will still buy it. They're __top-tier in hardware__, no doubt about it, but __their opinionated OS while pretty__ (to some, I still prefer Android visually) __is quite inferior and way less intuitive than its main competitor__. I moved to iPhone because I wanted a better, more reliable camera, and now I have it. But to be honest, objectively there's no other reason for me to ditch Android.

My personal experience moving from Android to iOS. The advantages and disadvantages of the new OS and how it feels for a first-time user.

Moving from Android to iPhone after a decade

## The job of a manager
Being a manager to me is mostly about __improving the quality of life of the engineers__ I work with. But most importantly doing so without my periodic intervention or their efforts. Because of this particular reason, I'm a fan of automating everything on my domain.

## Old processes
The other day we were trying to improve our service desk rotations. The current and old processes involved looking for your name in an embedded calendar on a notion document and then working through the tickets.The assignment lasted for three consecutive working days. There was no messaging, no one fully accountable for the service desk and don't even talk about automatic assignees in the tickets. __Tedious__.

## Rotations
We started with rotations alone. We started looking for apps that could do the following:

* __Notify__ at the beginning of the shift the person with the rotation assigned, hence removing the effort of looking through an old document
* __Automatic__ rotations based on a schedule, defining these rotations beforehand
* __Override__ assignee for a week, this is useful in case of vacations or absence due to different reasons
* __Specific handle__ in Slack (`@dev-on-call`), in case other teams want to communicate with the assignee without knowing our internal schedule

We finally ended up opting for [Tellspin](https://tellspin.app/). A Slack App that does all of this and can even handle multiple rotations at a time. So in the future, if we want to have rotations for creating a newsletter, handling a specific meeting, or different tasks, we can do it 💪.

## Service Desk
We also had an antiquated system to get support/service desk tickets. It was a custom google form with an integration that ended up creating a ticket in a ClickUp board. It was hard to follow, edit and mantain.

We switched to using [JIRA Service Management](https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-management). Yes, I know, a lot of people *hate* JIRA. In my case, I only hated it when it was poorly administrated and had a lot of unnecessary restrictions like complex and convoluted workflows.

We created a __Service Desk__ with a few types of requests and some internal __JIRA Automation__ to move the status automatically if an engineer answered a ticket or another employee outside of our team did. The thing is, the first assignee was still, well, no one. And even if we had a bot at the beginning of the week letting you know you're the assignee, there was no notification that a ticket had been created (apart from a feed channel with this tickets). So, how did we solve this?

## Current solution
We realized the solutions were not coupled in any way now. So to create an on-call in OpsGenie or have a default assignee in JIRA wouldn't work because it'd be out of sync with Tellspin on Slack. So since Tellspin handled well rotations and overrides, we decided it was our source of truth.

### Creating a Slack App
At the moment doesn't seem like Tellspin has a public-facing API to query who's on-call for a certain rotation. The only thing we thought of doing was: to ask Slack, but how?
We created a __Slack App__ with the following permissions:
 * `users:read`
 * `users:read.email`
 * `usergroups:read`

This it's basically to be able to query groups and user emails. Remember that Tellspin creates a handle `@dev-on-call`? Well, this is managed with user groups. So if we can query the group, then the user, and get the email, we're __one step closer__.

Our only thing left here generating a token for the app by installing it in our workspace. And, no, __we're not going to use our app__, we just need the token and the permissions to __create requests__ from somewhere else.

### JIRA Automation to the rescue
__JIRA Automation__ is a powerful tool for this kind of thing. We even built some stuff that solves issues automatically by triggering requests to protected APIs. But in this case, we needed something more operational and interconnected.
In JIRA Automation we've created a rule that goes something like this:
1. When `issue` is `created`
2. GET `https://slack.com/api/usergroups.users.list?usergroup=<YOUR-USER-GROUP-ID>`
3. GET `https://slack.com/api/users.info?user=<YOUR-USER-ID>`
4. GET `https://<YOUR-ATLASSIAN-DOMAIN>.atlassian.net/rest/api/3/user/search?query=<YOUR-USER-EMAIL>`
5. Assign `issue` to `<USER-ID>`

In __point 2__, we've hardcoded the group, it's not a bad thing but we could add another step or two to list the user groups and pick the one we want, but Tellspin is not creating new groups so far, so it works. When we create this request we're answered by the Slack API with a list of a single user, with __an alpha-numerical user ID__.
In __point 3__ we use that user ID to get the info, and more importantly, the __e-mail__ of the user.
In __point 4__ we use the e-mail to query the __user ID from Atlassian__. Why? We need that to assign the issue to someone we can't do it by any other fields. And it makes sense, other fields can change, but not the user ID.

Done, nothing else to do. Now you have automatic assignees based on your Tellspin rotations, always updated.

## Closing thoughts
When we were starting to explore this issue we were trying to find a single tool that did all of it:
* Slack reminders
* Creating Slack group handle
* Auto-assign JIRA issues
* Schedule Management
* Assignee overrides

And we didn't find a product like that. Sometimes, we need to stop looking for magical solutions that cover every single of our use cases.
Fortunately, we're relentless and I particularly cannot endure defeat, so I have to keep going.
Thanks for reading and I hope it helps you out in some way

How to automate rotations like service desk assignments, support boards, responsibilities and more through common tools and some clever tricks. Let's explore it together.

Automating Engineering Rotations with JIRA, Tellspin & Slack

This is my first entry to this blog. I think it's really suited for the occasion, it's a nice experience to share, and __it's going to suck__. But sucking __it's fine!__ It's my first blog post, there's no way this is going to be the best entry ever, and I'm ok with it.

Let's introduce myself, my name is __Gabriel Miranda__. I'm an __Engineering Manager / Software Engineer__ from __Buenos Aires, Argentina__. I'm 30 years old and I was looking to share some thoughts in a place where I can feel them on my own. So I've decided to quit stalling and create my own personal blog.

To start things off I had in mind one thing: I need to finish it in one day (realistically). Nothing about thinking we're superman and doing this crazy convoluted thing of creating our own custom CMS (been there). So I've resorted to already known technologies: [react.js](https://reactjs.org/), [next.js](https://nextjs.org/), classless CSS ([bahunya](https://hakanalpay.com/bahunya/)), [contentful](https://www.contentful.com/) & [GitHub](https://github.com/), both actions and pages.

I've been working with react.js since 2015 and with next.js since early 2017. Had a couple of years of tinkering around with contentful (and it allows rich text, media, and more), CSS always was my buddy and classless libraries/frameworks made it easier for me. Okay, now what? I need a place to store it. I don't want to pay for this (If I can get around it). So let's build the site via GitHub actions and publish it to GitHub pages (yes, you can do that and even with pages that have a build step like next.js nowadays).

The only thing missing now was an easy (kind of) to-remember URL so instead of having my GitHub page URL it would be more personal. I went with the new shiny .dev domains and used the handle I have in many social media apps, gabmir (as if you wouldn't have guessed it stands for gabriel miranda, duh).
The last thing to do was to trigger the action also on a webhook from contentful __et voilà__. I have a static built on push / publish / unpublish blog and I can write from wherever I want since I don't need to use git to publish an entry. Most of the content will look great thanks to almost no using classes (there's some tiny css in there) and I can share my thoughts freely.

__Key takeaways__: done is better than perfect, aim to finish things, iterate later. To get things done quickly and successfully, already known tools are your best allies. Don't expect the first version to be the best, it's not going to.

It is clearly not even remotely close to a really good blogging platform and is still missing many features (metadata, open graph, Twitter card tags, RSS, and more). __But it's good for now__.

How I created my own personal blog in a day leveraging technologies I'm used to like react.js, next.js, classless css & github pages.

gabmirdev

Moving from Android to iPhone after a decade

Automating Engineering Rotations with JIRA, Tellspin & Slack

Creating a static blog in one day