Hi,

I’m Dmitry Rodionov, a software engineer for Apple platforms.

I’ve been making macOS apps and tools since 2011; I was involved in and led projects for Sympli, Mental Faculty, Apparent Software, ZipZapMac, Cuckoo Sandbox, farmerswife, XLware, Jacob Ruiz, Eden Vidal and dozens other companies and individuals globally. I also do open source occasionally.

I’m available for hire

Currently open for short-term contract work or full time employment.

Email, GitHub, Twitter, Mastodon, LinkedIn

Would love to work on macOS apps, design tools, SDKs and frameworks; to dive into reverse-engineering; and to make cross-platform apps feel at home on macOS.

I’m looking for a place where I can be involved in high-level product discussions and talking to users as well as writing code. I admire companies that innovate in accessibility, UI design tools, productivity, and collaboration.

I have a proven track record of adapting to different communication styles and workflows across teams and companies; but I thrive in remote environments with async communications and written culture the most.

Experience


Sympli Versions	Sympli Handoff	Studies for Mac

Shotty	Ensembles	Studies for iOS

ImageFramer	MemoryCleaner	Trickster

Cuckoo Sandbox	Cirkus for Mac	Archiver for iPhone

Product Owner, Lead macOS Engineer

Sympli, 2017–now

As a product owner of Sympli Versions and macOS engineering lead on a small team, I’m wearing many different hats big and small at the same time:

While working on a product vision, I take an active part in establishing core features for the future versions of the product as a set of high-level proposals; then driving those proposals across the company, iterating on the feedback and adjusting ideas to business needs; then building an actionable roadmap out of all the decisions made on previous steps.
Acting as an engineering manager, it’s my responsibility to convey technical requirements for backend, desktop and QA teams; coordinate their workload and adjust the scope of work to meet deadlines. At times, this managerial hat would also bring me to hiring, interviewing and onboarding new teammates.
As a customer support specialist, I’m often the first responder for regular and priority support requests. There’s also communicating product and technical aspects of Sympli Versions and Handoff to users via marketing materials and support channels; troubleshooting and figuring out workarounds with affected clients directly.
Finally, as a lead engineer on the desktop team, my focus is on building a robust native macOS app that has to orchestrate user documents, git-level storage and transport layers, semantic Sketch document versioning and diffing, pull request management, and UI-driven merge conflict resolution of cross-dependent entities in a constantly evolving Sketch document format.

I’m also a Sketch integration lead of Sympli Handoff where most of my effort goes into a non-trivial Objective‑C Sketch plugin that manipulates internal Sketch data model directly bypassing limited official APIs and sports a standalone UI flow. To mitigate the unstable nature of a native Sketch plugin, I’m maintaining an extensive automated test suite that validates private API contracts and specific document layout cases against multiple versions of Sketch.app (including the latest available beta version) simultaneously during a CI pass.

macOS Engineer

Apparent Software Inc., 2017, contractor

I was in charge of Batch Processing feature in ImageFramer: analyzed an existing single-threaded image processing engine and adapted it to work in a multi-threaded environment required for parallel application of image templates; built a UI flow for the highly-configurable batch export process.

Also made a few smaller contributions to Trickster: introduced a light theme (and theming support in general); updated the way file previews work there; made Watched Folders feature more reliable when macOS Sandbox is involved.

macOS/iOS Engineer

The Mental Faculty B.V., 2016, contractor

Worked on data import modules for a flashcard app Studies: built components for importing card sets from Quizlet.com and Excel spreadsheets, accompanied by documentation and sample code.

Contributed to a data sync framework Ensembles by updating a Dropbox-based cloud file system to work with Dropbox SDK v2; discovered and reported a few issues in the SDK itself.

Google Summer of Code Contributor

Cuckoo Sandbox, Summer 2015

Participated in Google Summer of Code during one of the summer breaks while pursuing a CS degree, adding support for analyzing macOS binaries in an automated malware analysis system.

The project involved automating virtualized macOS environments, (ab)using DTrace for dynamic analysis of potentially malicious executables, and writing end-to-end Python tests covering communications between a host OS and a virtual machine.

Freelance Software Engineer for Apple Platforms

Various clients, 2011-2017, part-time

Full-cycle software development: discussing business requirements with a client, building a prototype, iterating on a solution, collecting feedback, and publishing final products for distribution.

Worked on a multitude of tasks: from refactoring legacy codebases and writing Swift wrappers for C libraries to architecture review sessions, building Sketch plugins and rich Cocoa applications.

Open Source Contributor

2014-now

Being involved in open source since 2014, I’ve contributions in multiple projects, including:

sketch-hq/SketchAPI – a first-party Sketch JavaScript API
mas-cli/mas – a command line interface for Mac App Store
edenvidal/states – an innovative Sketch plugin for managing artboard states
cuckoosandbox/cuckoo – an automated malware analysis system

I also have a deep background in reverse-engineering and this experience still guides me today: whether it to figure out how third-party apps are built or how to work around some unexpected behaviour and bugs in system frameworks. Here’s a few of my research projects from that period:

task_vaccine – code injection for macOS
liblorgnette – interprocess symbol lookup that works on both iOS and macOS
SWRoute – the first PoC of function interception for pure Swift code in the wild
rd_route – a (yet another, yes) library for function hooking on macOS

Education

Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from TSU’17. My graduation project was a decompiler for Ruby virtual machine (YARV) bytecode as part of a PoC of bypassing RubyEncoder’s code obfuscation methods.