Hi,

Product Owner, macOS Engineer

Sympli Versions †, 2017 – 2025

As a product owner, I was drafting product proposals and driving them across the board, iterating and adjusting ideas to feedback. I managed to compose a few high-level roadmaps and some more detailed action plans for specific feature trees along the way.

As an occasional team lead, I was conveying technical requirements for backend, desktop, QA, and marketing teams; coordinating their workload and adjusting the scope of work to meet deadlines. I also hired and onboarded a few teammates.

As a first responder for customer support requests, a technical writer, and an author of various marketing materials, I had daily Intercom chats, Stripe dashboards, email threads, logs, and crash reports to investigate and respond to.

I was also involved in writing pitch decks for potential partners and investors, highlighting both our products and our team. A few of those pitches I ended up delivering myself.

Finally, I was leading the development of a native macOS app that put together Sketch document branching, semantic versioning, diffing and merging, design reviews and discussions. Built with Swift, AppKit, C++, NSOperations, Core Data, and libgit2.

Design Integrations Engineer

Sympli Handoff †, 2017 – 2025

I was responsible for the integrations side of Sympli Handoff where most of my effort went into a Sketch plugin that manipulates reverse-engineered Sketch data structures.

My favorite part of this project is an extensive automated test suite that validates private API contracts and specific document layout cases against multiple versions of Sketch during a CI run. All checks are performed dynamically inside Sketch via code injection and a bit of Objective-C metaprogramming. There’s also image snapshot testing for tricky setups that would be a nuisance to validate otherwise.

On top of that, I was maintaining plugins for Figma, Xcode, Adobe XD and Photoshop.

macOS Engineer

Apparent Software Inc., 2017, freelance

I was in charge of Batch Processing in ImageFramer: adapted a single-threaded image processing engine to work in a multi-threaded environment required for parallel application of image templates; built a configuration UI for the new batch export process.

Contributed to Trickster: introduced theming support and added a light UI theme; updated the way file previews work there; made Watched Folders play nicely with macOS Sandbox.

macOS & iOS Engineer

The Mental Faculty B.V., 2016, freelance

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 its Dropbox cloud file system to work with the Dropbox API v2, and reporting issues to the official SDK.

Google Summer of Code Participant

Cuckoo Sandbox, 2015

Participated in Google Summer of Code program for students. Added support for dynamic probing of macOS actors in an automated malware analysis system.

The project involved generation of 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.

Software Engineer for Apple Platforms

2011-2017, freelance

From refactoring legacy codebases and writing Swift wrappers for C libraries to architecture review sessions and technical mentorship, to developing Sketch and Apple Mail plugins, to kernel extensions and libimobiledevice-based MDM tools, to building full-featured iOS & macOS apps.

Open Source Contributor

since 2012

My open source contributions include:

• sketch-hq/SketchAPI – the official 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

Reverse Engineer / Security Researcher

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

Digging through the internals of various apps, frameworks and OS components made me a natural at figuring out the hidden magic that makes them work – which comes in handy when writing software for the notoriously underdocumented Apple platforms.

Here’s a few of my research projects from that period:

• task_vaccine – code injection for macOS
• liblorgnette – interprocess symbol lookup (used in a PoC for CVE-2014-8835)
• SWRoute – the first ever PoC of function hooking in pure Swift (see Swift Funtime)
• rd_route – function hooking in Mach-O binaries (used by Flavours †, Unreal Engine)