Jeff Hodsdon builds software for Apple platforms.

Basset is a native macOS app that opens the iOS runtime to AI coding agents. Built using method swizzling, KVO, and system calls; an Entity Component System; and multiple transports — USB, QUIC, HTTP/2 — local and remote.

• Camera callbacks timed through each photo’s capture stages.
• Large image creation traced to app call stacks, alongside IOSurface memory changes.
• Repeated taps captured with the view hierarchy, ready to trigger a thread snapshot.
• Automated testing through human-touch emulation via private native Apple APIs.

Instruments run on demand, on the device with the bug.

• Converted Ami’s shipping iOS social app to Bazel with modularization and BuildBuddy remote caching. Main builds went from 90s to 30s; isolated features build in 3s. Weekly releases continued throughout.
• Built UICollectionView chat with dynamic message layout.
• Built and optimized a Metal orb effect: bloom, halation, and chromatic facets, with 30+ orbs on screen at 60fps.

• j Camera: film emulation with a live preview at 60fps. Custom Metal grain responds to each pixel’s luminance, alongside color-cube and tone grading.
• j Newswire: a news reader with Claude agents gathering, deduplicating, and organizing coverage.

I built and shipped both apps on one modular Swift codebase, built with Bazel.

Built Alta’s fashion app for iOS from the ground up, with on-device clothing detection at five inferences per second and a modular Bazel build.

Designed a library of camera looks for amo’s photo-sharing app and translated Capture One color-grading data into Core Image filters. Also prototyped a sound-reactive menu button.

• Cut Peloton’s iOS fitness app binary size by 9% to get below the cellular download warning threshold.
• Built Bluetooth connectivity (CoreBluetooth) for third-party heart-rate monitors and rowing machines, streaming live metrics into workouts.
• Built server-driven UI for the home tab and a new tab bar.
• Led iOS 15 adoption and helped the design team use its new UI features.

Took Ticker, a consumer financial app, from an idea to launch on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS: live crypto and stock prices, real-time bid/ask depth charts, crypto and company news, and alerts on significant price moves. Owned prototyping, design iteration, and the native build.

Later built a Claude-based trading pipeline with separate analysis, trade generation, and risk assessment stages, structured outputs, and backtested prompts.

Built an iOS camera system and used it as a professional fashion photographer under The Moments. Clients included Dior, Calvin Klein, and Cartier, with portraits of Naomi Campbell.

• Rebuilt Namecheap’s iOS domain registration app on a three-person mobile team serving millions of customers, working directly with the Chief of Product.
• Shipped one-tap domain purchases with Apple Pay and coordinated the Android build.
• Built the FastVPN macOS menu bar app, with one-click connections and automatic reconnection when networks change.

Built Wefollow, a Twitter directory, with Kevin Rose in 2009: people added themselves under interest tags, and the directory ranked them. Digg acquired it that October.

Took it back in 2012 and relaunched it with rankings across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Grew to 1.3 million users.

Co-founded Milk with fellow Digg alumni and built Oink, an iOS recommendation app: 100,000 downloads in three weeks. The team joined Google in 2012.

Led the public API rebuild at social news site Digg, contributed to the OAuth working group, and built Facebook Connect with Facebook for its f8 launch.