Biography

Alaina is a senior iOS engineer at Calm where she pioneers Apple technologies new and old.

She rebuilt Calm's Apple Watch app in SwiftUI, spun up App Intents well before Apple finished documenting them, integrated Calm meditation access into the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, and spearheaded XCUITests as automated accessibility maintenance.

She has spoken at numerous conferences and published many articles.

She finds it fun to incorporate ideas from far-flung fields like linguistics and cooking into software engineering contexts.

When not writing code, you will find her far away from screens.

Talk: Long live the code comment!

Do you dare commit code without comments?

In this talk, I'll argue against the fantasy of a "self-documenting" codebase, and demonstrate how to write comments in your Swift project that add value in the moment and can be maintained for much longer.

I'll exemplify how to leverage Xcode's own documentation gizmos to uplevel your team's shared understanding of even the darkest corners of your codebase.