Ullrich Schäfer Email & Phone Number

Berlin, De

San Francisco, Us

Let me help you grow your teams engineering excellence, ship code faster and more stable. I also do good old software development for iOS (ObjC and Swift) and React Native.

Berlin, Berlin, De

In early 2023 I transitioned into the Growth pillar (as part of a company wide re-org), where I got to start a new team with a focus on user activation. The team was build up of 4 engineers (2 backend, 2 frontend), one designer, one PM and one lifecycle marketing expert.Challenges:1. Setting up a new team from scratch: Kicked off the team with workshops on team values, leading up to a "social contract" on how we as a team want to work together. Accelerating how fast the team moved from forming to performing. Installed coffee chats (informal 1:1s between random team members) to build team cohesion and trust by strengthening social bonds.2. Building an experimentation mindset: Worked with our PM to scope out a big hypothesis we broke down into small projects which got shipped as A/B tests. Observed their impact in Amplitude and shared analytics skills with the team to empower each member to dive into the data themselves.3. Taking ownership of onboarding code: Identified that our work on user activation will need a solid onboarding codebase. Came up with a plan to pull the onboarding logic into its own module and modelled it around a state machine. This allowed us to unit test the flow and easily re-compose the onboarding steps into different flows and run A/B test on them.In Q4 I was trusted with managing a second team in the Growth pillar, now directly managing 8 engineers working in two distinct area, effectively managing two thirds of the entire pillar, reporting directly to the CTO.In 2024 my Pitch story unfortunately ended with the January 2024 layoffs: https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/08/pitch-christian-reber-venture-funding

Berlin, Berlin, De

Became Team Lead of Pitch's new Mobile Team after hiring more engineers, taking on a blend of Engineering and Product Management. The challenge was aligning Pitch's organisational setup with Mobile's evolving focus on Collaboration and Consumption. This lead to moving the team away from building app features to doing platform support.Transformed the mobile team into a platform support unit, enabling all product teams to ship on web and mobile with low effort. Emphasizing infrastructure like a mobile design system + component library for consistent user experiences across multiple product teams.Focused on:1. Continued Hiring: Led recruitment for engineers, designer, and PM, building a Mobile team of 7, with 5 engineers, product design and PM2. Continued Engineering: Actively coded, specializing in the native aspects of iOS and Android apps, collaborating closely with other product and infrastructure teams at Pitch.3. Onboarding New Engineers: Ensured new hires' success by introducing them to Clojurescript and Pitch's engineering practices, fostering integration into the team.4. Product Management: Before we hired a PM I shared product management responsibilities with the product designer, coordinating with peers and stakeholders to align projects with the company's product roadmap.

Berlin, Berlin, De

I was hired as the first mobile Engineer at Pitch at a time when the company was below 40 employees and just had launched a private beta.At that time Pitch had a web and desktop app, build with React and Electron. The companies engineering org was (and still is) running 100% on Clojure(Script).In my role I've built the first version of the mobile app using React-Native and ClojureScript as well. Some responsibilities of mine during that time include:- Learning Clojure 😅- Setting up the mobile app as part of our monorepo- Evaluating ClojureScript React-Native approaches and eventually landing on shadow-cljs- Coming up with code reuse patterns from a code base that was predominantly web focused- CI and CD, using detox e2e and jest tests and automating the App Store release process for iOS and Android via Fastlane- Started hiring to build up a team around mobile- Started frontend on-call duty which lead to strong connections into all parts of the companyTwo big wins:1. Enabled code reuse from the main app: All networking, syncing and authentication logic. Slide rendering, commenting and workflow logic.2. Automated releases: weekly AppStore releases with zero developer interaction needed. Internally distributed builds with auto updating for Canary and each GitHub PR

Berlin, Berlin, De

I am dividing my time 30/70 between Engineering Management and DevelopmentEngineering Management- Leading a team of 8 developers across iOS, Android and React-Native- Introduced career plans, 1:1s and an improved feedback culture- Implemented monthly workshops to foster knowledge sharing across platform boundaries- Pushed CI and testing across all projects using our self hosted GitLab CIReact-Native Lead- Gained deep expertise in RN development while shipping 5 very different apps including one for Android TV- TypeScript on ES2018- State management with MobX and Redux- react-navigation for powerful cross platform navigation- Native Module development in Java, Kotlin, Objective-C and Swift- Push Notifications using Firebase- Offline SQLite databases with TypeOrm and WatermelonDB: - SQLite FTS for full text search - Offline mutations and syncing- Testing via Jest, e2e testing with detox.js - App beta distribution via AppCenter, Testflight and Google Play

Member of the NewsFeed team - focus area conversations and comments, owning comments in iOS NewsFeed.I owned the comments codebase on the Facebook iOS app that ~150 million people used to connect across the globe.My biggest project was refactoring the iOS comments codebase:Context: Comments are used all across the app: as part of the newsfeed, on individual stories, in a popover on photos and other placesWhen I started the code was organised as an inheritance hierarchy of 3 UIViewControllers subclassing and extending each other (~3-5k LoC each). Interfaces and responsibilities were not well defined. Table data source exceptions were a common scenario.Over the ~9 month project I was able to iteratively transform the entire code base into a React like structure based on ComponentKit (https://componentkit.org/), fostering a composability and unidirectional data flow. Using aggressive composability, A/B testing and gradual rollouts I was able to replace the entire comments codebase, surface by surface until the legacy last view controller could be removed.The new comments architecture enabled crucial new future features (most of which I got to build my self):- Threaded comments- Reactions on comments (first time use of GraphQL subscriptions were used in a real world product)During my time at Facebook I got to:- Work on a product used by 150 millions people globally https://techcrunch.com/2013/01/04/how-many-mobile-users-does-facebook-have/- Interview, hire and mentor great folks for the NewsFeed team- Work closely with some of the brightest minds of our industry

Berlin, De

We build Mac and iOS applications. http://nxtbgthng.comBesides being one of two managing directors I also get to code a lot still.

Berlin, Berlin, De

Working on their iOS & Mac projects.

Consultant, designer and developer for Mac and iOS applications.

Kraków, Pl

Working Student while finishing my studies.Building features for their flagship ERP and CMS tools.

Internship at Comarch R&D department in Warsaw/PL.Building functional UI components for a cross-platform BI reporting tool named OCEAN GenRap.

Munich, Bavaria, De

Internship - Adding product ratings to the hybris J2EE e-commerce platform.