I build mobile apps and help other engineers grow.
I'm Nanda, an iOS engineer and mentor. I currently facilitate at the Apple Developer Academy and study NLP and retrieval-augmented generation.
- Building a macOS menu bar app with SwiftUI: a real SSH server monitor I wanted my server's CPU without opening a terminal, so I built a tiny app that lives in the menu bar: MenuBarExtra, talking SSH from Swift, an actor-based service that hides the complexity, and polling that respects your battery.
- RAG is not magic: building retrieval-augmented generation from zero Your LLM doesn't know your documents. RAG is a disciplined way of showing them to it: embeddings, a vector store, and top-k retrieval, built up from first principles in about a hundred lines of Python, plus where naive RAG quietly fails.
- Foundation Models: running Apple's on-device LLM in your iOS app No API key, no server, no internet. A roughly 3-billion-parameter model already lives on your user's iPhone. How to call it in five lines, have it return typed Swift with guided generation, and when to fall back to the cloud.
- Running iOS UI tests without opening Xcode: xcodebuild, clean output, and an agent that fixes itself How to drive XCUITest from the command line with xcodebuild, turn its firehose of output into something readable, and close the loop so an AI agent can write a feature, run the tests, read the failure, and fix itself.
- SwiftData in production: what the tutorials do not tell you SwiftData demos look easy until you ship a POS app with 10,000 transactions. A field guide to the four traps that bite real apps (@Query overuse, unpaginated lists, delete-rule crashes, and background writes) with production Swift code and an honest SwiftData vs Core Data vs GRDB verdict.
- The AI Access Ladder: a framework for responsible AI use in learning We did not ban AI. We built a ladder instead: five levels of access, from no-AI fundamentals to full delegation, matched to what a learner is actually trying to build. The decision rules, the science of desirable difficulty, and the honest results, including the failures.
- The quiet power of Claude Code hooks Hooks are the part of Claude Code almost nobody turns on: small shell commands that fire at fixed points in the agent's loop, so you can auto-format every edit, block a dangerous command before it runs, or ping yourself when a task finishes, deterministically, without asking the model to remember. A look at what they are, where they live, and three I keep switched on.
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Mentoring
1:1 sessions for iOS engineers and people finding their way into the field: code review, architecture, interviews, career direction. The same mentoring I've done on ADPList and Dealls since 2023.
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Mobile App Development
Contract Swift and SwiftUI work, from greenfield builds to architecture rescues. Production experience across banking, healthcare, and education.
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Applied AI & RAG
Help designing and debugging retrieval-augmented generation and NLP systems, from chunking and retrieval quality to getting answers you can trust from your own data.
Work with me
If any of this overlaps with what you're building, or you'd like a mentor in your corner, my inbox is open.
Email hello@nandamochammad.xyz Book a session on ADPList or find me on LinkedIn