Engineering Blog

Introduction

Every iOS app starts the same way: one target, one folder, one place for everything. Developers move fast, ship features, and the codebase grows. For a while, that’s fine. The friction is quiet at first. Then, you make a one-line fix and watch the compiler rebuild the entire app. You search for a utility someone wrote before and find three versions scattered across different folders. Before long, it’s everywhere. This is the jou

Most developers, when asked to "add some permissions," reach for the simplest tool available: roles. Give someone a role, and that role comes with a fixed set of things they can see and do.

But real-world software rarely stays simple. HR platforms face a genuinely tricky problem: people in the same role don't always need the same access. A 'Manager' might oversee a team of five, or they might run payroll for five hundred. An 'Admin' might hand

The opportunity

One of our main aims at BrightHR is to empower users with features that leverage emerging technologies. In today's world, AI tools are rapidly changing how we interact with digital services and their utility cannot be ignored. This poses a challenge for anyone that works with consumer-facing software; how do we harness this new technology, and more importantly, how can we use it to drive value for our users?

These questions

Database performance can make or break an application's user experience. When your application starts slowing down due to inefficient queries, users notice, and they don't wait around. At BrightHR, we experienced this firsthand when our production systems were struggling with query performance issues that were directly impacting our users and infrastructure costs.

MongoDB indexing became our solution for dramatically improving query performance

Mastery in coding doesn't come overnight. It’s the result of deliberate, consistent practice. Just like playing a musical instrument or training for a marathon, practice is essential for success. One powerful technique that has stood the test of time among developers is the coding kata.

Borrowed from martial arts, where "kata" refers to a choreographed pattern of movements practiced to perfection, **coding katas are small programming exerc

If you've ever opened an old Flutter project and found yourself wading through a jungle of widgets, services, and mysterious global variables, you're not alone. It starts innocently: just a screen here, a button there, but before you know it, everything's tangled together, and you are lost. That’s where Clean Architecture comes into the picture. It's not a buzzword, but a practical approach to organize your codebase in a way that's scalable,

A small insight with a big impact - thumb navigation

Have you ever thought about how you use your thumb when navigating your phone? Most people assume they tap and scroll using the centre of their thumb - but is this actually the case?

Let’s test this with a quick experiment. Open you favorite mobile app and start scrolling and tapping as you normally would. Now, observe your thumb…Where do you think it’s making a contact with the screen?

Introduction

At BrightHR we utilise Flutter to build our BrightSafe On The Go (BSOTG), PoP, and Advice apps. Flutter enables us to build once and deploy to multiple platforms, simplifying and speeding up development.

In 2023 we began development on two new features; Praise (for employee recognition), and Learning Management (for E-Learning). We required these features to be available within BSOTG and our native BrightHR apps. We needed to b

Introduction

The Composable Architecture (TCA) is a design pattern and architectural framework that has come into vogue as a paradigm and tool with which to structure complex iOS codebases, particularly those built with Apple’s modern declarative SwiftUI framework. Recent months have seen BrightHR’s iOS Guild make concerted efforts to refactor the main BrightHR and Blip apps, migrating away from traditional patterns such as MVVM and VIPER in