App Maker Spotlight: Jack Chatterton
JACK CHATTERTON / App Maker
ArcTouch Senior Software Engineer
[Editor’s note: This is part of an ongoing series that highlights ArcTouch’s talented team members. Our staff are all “app makers” in the spirit of the maker movement — we crave getting our hands on the latest tech or finding creative solutions to our clients’ challenges.]
If you have a career in mobile app development, delivering the news is probably the last thing on your mind. But that’s exactly what ArcTouch senior engineer Jack Chatterton has spent much of the past year obsessing about.
Of course, this has nothing to do with a neighborhood newspaper route. Chatterton, this month’s ArcTouch app maker spotlight, has been working with NBC’s talented Seattle app development team, the fruits of which include the recently released NBC News app for Android and iOS.
I recently had a chance to chat with Chatterton, a 34-year-old Kansas City native, about what it’s like working with the broadcast giant’s technical team — and the “thrill” of working on an app that can deliver the news to millions of potential users.
We’ll get to coding in a minute. But first, what do you like to do in your free time?
In my free time I work on installation-scale, collaborative, mixed media art projects and avidly pursue amateur craft bartending.
How did you first become interested in mobile app development?
I jumped into mobile in 2010 after a couple years of watching the smartphone market accelerate. It became clear that native mobile development was going to be around for the long haul. Besides the career potential, I’d also started using a smartphone — and it was obvious to me that the power of personal, networked computing in this small, portable form was changing the world.
What do you like most about your job?
Working on projects that hundreds of thousands — sometimes even millions — of people will use is thrilling! Particularly when you realize that your knowledge, skill and hard work really benefit the user.
What are some of your specialties (from a coding perspective)?
Like most of my colleagues at ArcTouch, I am equally comfortable doing native work on both Android and iOS. As a programming language polyglot, I am also competent to engineer what is called the full slice of a feature, which may include server-side work. Lean software development (LSD) and behavior-driven development (BDD) are the two workflow methodologies I am most keen on.
What is it like working side-by-side with the NBC team?
The team has been fantastic! It was just myself, the engineering lead, and another developer when I started. The team has since grown and we’re all moving at full speed now. It’s remarkable to watch how much progress gets made between monthly releases.
What is the focus of your work on the NBC News app?
I’ve been working on simplifying the UX and bringing the app’s code quality and reliability up to modern standards.
What is the biggest development challenge of the app?
The app was one of the earliest news broadcast applications and has quite a bit of internal complexity. Learning how all of it works, and doing the archaeology to find out why it works that way, has been a challenge. My work at NBC has allowed me to simplify that quite a bit, leading to improved developer productivity (and happiness!) all around.
What do you like most about the development work with NBC?
I really dig the fundamental architecture of the code base, which allows us to maintain three apps (Nightly News, NBC News, and the TODAY show) with a single back end.