Hi, I'm Peter.

I love building things people actually use. Over the years I’ve learned that the part they see is the small part. Behind every good app sits a system: APIs, devices, data, other teams’ code, and a long list of decisions about how it all fits together. Designing that system is the work I enjoy most.

These days I’m a Staff iOS Engineer in the medical device world, leading the architecture of a shared platform that several apps build on. I can’t say much more than that, except that it’s a place where getting things right really matters.

I got here the long way round, and I’m glad I did. I’ve built web backends and multi-touch installations, worked on automotive systems, given a museum its first public API, helped ship a safety wearable, and spent the last decade deep in native iOS. Having worked on every side of an API makes me much better at deciding where its edges belong.

Through all of it, the person at the other end is who I’m building for. A system is only as good as what it feels like to use.

And since you’re still reading: I hold five driver’s licenses, and my first open-source contribution was translating the manual for a CD-burning tool into German more than twenty years ago. Ask me about either.

What I do

I architect systems, not just apps

My favourite problems are bigger than one screen or one codebase: a platform that several apps share, a feature architecture a whole team adopts, a mature app that needs a new foundation while it keeps shipping. I work out the structure, prove it with prototypes, and stay until it’s real.

I design the APIs and contracts in between

Most of what makes a system reliable happens at its seams, where the app meets the backend, the backend meets a device, or one team’s module meets another’s. I’ve designed public APIs, documented backend contracts across platforms, rebuilt networking layers, and written the Bluetooth plumbing that connects phones to wearables, beacons and gateways.

I build for the person holding it

I’m passionate about user experience, and I don’t think architecture and UX are separate jobs. I prototype early, work side by side with designers, and treat accessibility as part of building the thing. At Community.com I led the work to bring Dynamic Type and VoiceOver across the app and into its automated tests.

I make teams better at this

Good systems come from teams that understand them. I mentor engineers at every level, write decisions down so they outlast the meeting, and fix whatever slows people down, from CI pipelines to moving an entire iOS organization to Apple Silicon.

Things I've built

A is for Art Museum

An indoor-location treasure hunt that spans a whole museum.

Rodin Museum

A location-aware guide, and the start of a museum's mobile platform.

Baby's Vision

See the world the way your baby does.

Beacon Walker

Walk through a building full of iBeacons from your desk.

More work

Touch tables, installations, museum tools and a few experiments.

See everything

Where I've worked

Right now I lead the architecture of a shared platform for connected medical devices, working across engineering, product and quality in a regulated environment. The details stay under wraps.

Before that, at Eventbrite I designed the modular feature architecture that the Search and Discovery team adopted, rebuilt its networking layer, and built the experimentation infrastructure behind Browse and Explore. At Keepsafe I was brought in to set the architectural direction for a mature app with a large user base. At Community.com I led the migration of a large messaging app to a modular architecture, one feature package at a time. In between, I led iOS at Pawp.

Through my studio, Alt Interactive, I worked with startups in fintech, healthcare, hospitality and IoT, often across the whole stack: an emergency console for hotel workers spanning web, iOS and an Elixir backend, and the app that provisioned a large rollout of Bluetooth gateways.

At ROAR for Good I led architecture and UX for a personal-safety platform that paired an iOS app with a Bluetooth wearable. At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, as its first in-house software developer, I built the museum’s first public collection API along with the apps, backends and indoor-positioning system on top of it.

Before that came touch tables and installations in Germany and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a stretch in automotive systems engineering. That’s where I first learned to think in systems.

The full history is on LinkedIn.

Awards

Gold MUSE Award, American Alliance of Museums, for A is for Art Museum (Education and Outreach) 2016
Semi-finalist, 3M Art & Technology Award, Minneapolis Institute of Art 2016, 2017
Art of Engineering Award, Ferchau, for Souvi 2010