Engineering Focus

The engineering priorities of this project reflect what matters most in production environments.

Correctness over happy paths

Features are built to behave correctly across failure cases — authentication token expiration, network errors mid-flow, partial backend responses, empty states. The goal is to handle these situations gracefully rather than assuming everything goes as planned. Users in production don’t follow the happy path.

Testability as a structural constraint

The architecture is designed to be testable by default. This is not a post-hoc concern — it shapes how the code is structured from the beginning.

• ViewModels are tested without a UI, by injecting mock dependencies
• Domain logic is tested without a network layer
• Backend endpoints are tested against a real database in isolation
• End-to-end tests verify full request flows across the stack

The test suite covers unit, integration, and end-to-end scenarios across both the iOS app and the backend.

Maintainability as a long-term constraint

Adding a new feature should not require touching unrelated parts of the system. This is enforced through:

• Clear module boundaries on the iOS side (presentation, domain, data)
• Separated concerns on the backend (routing, services, repositories)
• Typed contracts between layers, both within the app and across the client/server boundary

Production-readiness from day one

The backend runs in production from the start. This means structured logging, error tracking, a deployment pipeline, and monitoring — not just code that works locally.

The iOS app follows the same standard: environment management, release builds configured correctly, and a distribution workflow that mirrors what professional teams use. The goal is not to prepare for production at the end, but to operate at production quality throughout.