Also a F/T developer on Apple platforms for about 10 years. Obligatory disclaimer been a fanboy (and called much worse things ) for much longer than a decade. More of the same, was also doing Java-based web dev until the iPad came out. Heck, I have very similar photos from WWDC and tons of blurry cam of people’s biz cards I was excited to meet.

Which is why I feel for the guy and hope he solves his burnout problems, but there’s a tons of misdirection going on here. Once you strip out the inspo photos…it seems he’s trying to build some sort of CI tool he calls windmill – sure, fine. Let’s evaluate accordingly…

> I had hacked together a continuous delivery pipeline using Jenkins and Apple’s Command Line Tools and I thought there must be a better way to do this.

And yet, no real description of what that might be. If you dig into it, he’s basically trying to automate allowing contractors to sign code using their customer's code signing certs by having them install something on dev machines + build servers. Which is an interesting experiment…EXCEPT that’s 100% against the terms of the Apple Platforms Development Agreement and the iOS / code-signing security model.

Apple’s been clear on this for a while now (and seemingly to him): If one exports an iOS app using dev/ad-hoc profiles, it has to be for limited distribution among individuals within the same business entity (very manual, UDIDs, physical connections to Xcode, etc) Or using TestFlight. He never addresses this, and the HN community is happy to make him the misplaced martyr of big bad Apple restricting indie devs. Maybe, just maybe, he’s missing the bigger picture. Why could that be...?

> I had just left my job and I was thinking of quitting the software industry too.

Oh.

> Still, I had Windmill to carry me forward. I took a leap of faith and jumped into the unknown, being all poetic. Windmill allows me to have freedom of expression, be creative

Uhh...poetry is nice, but we were talking about CI. As his target audience, I'm not looking for tooling that strokes an author's ego about freedom of creative expression. I am looking for meaningful, well-built utilities. I expect Apple as the OS vendor and App Store operator to maintain the security model so I can continue to build software on a robust and secure platform.

> My dedication to see Windmill through and in the process take control of my life and destiny. You see, Windmill as I envision it, is more than just a Mac app. Literally and figuratively speaking. It’s hard to put this into words, no matter how much I try. It’s a vision after all. My dent in the universe.

This is exactly why it's a terrible idea to derive self-worth based on a software project, regardless of what the project is or what platform it's for. When that happens, it's too easy to avoid level headed introspection and retrospection on what one is building.

tl;dr; Article's author is trying to publish a misguided iOS CI tool to the App Store. Idea has some big conceptual issues (both UIX and technical architecture), looks like a bad Xcode + TestFlight clone, liberally rips off of Apple's dev toolchain IP, etc. When faced with such things, doubles down on inspospeak rather than accepting the reality check. Now is blaming Apple.

Balance one guy's opinion against the 30+ major iOS deployment/distro/CI/automation tools & frameworks out there on awesome-ios alone. Contributors to fastlane, Carthage, CocoaPods, etc are still going strong and the  dev ecosystem is better for it.