Tony Arnold
Principal Software Engineer at The CocoaBots
Newcastle-Maitland, New South Wales, Australia
Summary
🤩
RockstarTony Arnold is a Principal Software Engineer with ~20 years specialising in macOS and iOS development, currently shaping platform tooling at Mantel Group while running his long-standing indie consultancy, The CocoaBots. He blends deep hands-on expertise in Swift, Objective-C and Xcode with product-minded design: shipping polished, accessible UIs and maintaining Reveal, a complex macOS debugging tool he has modernised with Swift, SwiftUI and Swift Concurrency. Tony is a seasoned open-source maintainer and contributor—his work spans high-profile projects like Sparkle, RxSwift/ReactiveCocoa, App Center and SwiftFormat—often improving build, CI and release automation as well as core library ergonomics. As a leader he mentors engineers, drives architectural improvements, and pairs pragmatic engineering with thoughtful UX. Notably, he treats dependency use as stewardship, regularly contributing back to widely used OSS and automating release flows (e.g., ED25519 signing and GitHub Actions for Sparkle). He’s as comfortable presenting at Cocoa meetups and conferences as he is knee-deep in code solving tricky platform integration and testing challenges.
20 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
2,839reputation
824kreached
26answers
21questions
cocoapods
top-5%
xcode
top-5%
ios
top-5%
Github Skills (51)
test-automation10
unit-testing10
objective-c10
github-ci10
ios10
code-signing10
discord-js10
discord10
testing10
test-framework10
swiftui-app10
swift-package-manager10
appkit10
xctest10
cicd10
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
specta/expecta
Dec 2013 - Dec 2018
A Matcher Framework for Objective-C/Cocoa
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:2 releases, 52 commits, 9 PRs in 5 years
Contributions summary:Tony's commits primarily focus on updating and refactoring the testing framework for the `expecta/expecta` repository. They converted the testing framework to use XCTest, removed legacy SenTestingKit references, and updated test helper files. These changes included modifying test files, integrating new test interfaces, and modernizing the Objective-C syntax used within the testing environment.
objective-c
DeclarativeHub/Bond
Apr 2015 - Apr 2020
A Swift binding framework
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:1 release, 194 commits, 70 PRs in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Tony primarily contributed to the Bond framework by adding bindings for AppKit and other macOS-specific frameworks, extending the framework's capabilities. They implemented and tested these bindings for NSTextField, CALayer, NSTextView, and other UI elements, enabling reactive programming paradigms within the AppKit framework. The user also made improvements to the underlying notification handling and the integration of the Diff.swift and other dependencies. Furthermore, the user refactored the reactive API to leverage Bonds instead of DynamicSubjects for improved developer experience.
swift
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