Inside Spotify’s iOS Infrastructure: A Day with Patrick Balestra
Patrick Balestra, a Senior iOS Engineer at Spotify’s Stockholm office, spends his days building the tools that let other developers ship code faster. Originally from Switzerland, Balestra has been in Sweden for nearly three years.
Morning: Building the Developer Experience
Balestra describes himself as at his best after nine hours of sleep, so he wakes later than most and prepares as if heading to the office. His preferred breakfast is Nutella on toast, a habit he hasn’t given up despite his time in Stockholm.
By 10:00am, he is logged in and checking messages. His official role is iOS engineer on the Infrastructure team, which means he owns the iOS developer experience: creating libraries, tools, and solutions to help engineers work more efficiently. Over the past year, however, his focus has shifted to a larger monorepo and Bazel system project. That work is not limited to iOS—it aims to unify how tooling functions and where code lives across all of Spotify’s development teams. It is an evolving, ongoing effort with constant improvements.
Coordinating Across Time Zones
Balestra’s team is split between Stockholm and New York, a setup that made the transition to remote work relatively simple. Still, he is social by nature and misses the office environment—the casual chats and insight into what other teams are working on. He stays connected by meeting nearby colleagues for lunch at local restaurants.
While Stockholm’s winters are harsh, Balestra—being Swiss-Italian—is accustomed to snow and ice. As the weather warms, he notes the city becomes more vibrant, with full restaurants and a lively atmosphere.
Afternoon: Collaboration and Open Source
The afternoon brings an uptick in meetings as the New York side of the team wakes up. This leaves less time for writing code or reviewing documents. Balestra also dedicates time to the wider engineering community through open source work, often juggling multiple side projects. One notable recent contribution was helping open source XCMetrics, a Spotify-developed tool for Apple’s Xcode that collects, displays, and tracks metrics from build logs. It gives teams insight into their builds, helping to improve both developer experience and productivity.
Evening: Late Work and Football
Balestra tends to work fairly late to maximize overlap with colleagues in New York. Around 7:00pm, he shifts to downtime—movies, video games, and the usual relaxation. Thursday evenings are reserved for football with other Spotify employees. Over the last year, he has also taken up cooking more seriously, often hosting his girlfriend or friends for dinner to test new recipes. He has, somewhat unexpectedly, become the chef of his group.
